When I first moved to the Northland I already had many fishing seasons under my belt. During my new fishing adventures I started boating lots of walleye and pike in addition to the largemouth, smallmouth, and crappie I had grown up catching.
My friend Larry kept telling me about this other mystical fish. He painted vivid word pictures of vicious freshwater barracudas that ate five – pound carp for lunch. He would remove his hat and speak in reverent hushed tones out of respect for his Holy Grail of fish – the muskie.
His extreme devotion and enthusiasm kept me a bit unnerved. After all, I had never seen this brutal beast of the fresh water. The stories he told were ones that grabbed and kept your attention. He waxed eloquent about broken rods, wounds requiring stitches, ducks and even small dogs being taken under as a mid-morning snack. A fish that hunted mammals for lunch – way cool!
Larry’s fishing tackle stash was impressive to say the least. I didn’t know any one else who used pool cues to cast out 80-pound test braided, no stretch line attached to 200-pound test piano wire leaders connected by cross lock swivels to a 10-inch chunk of wood weighing the better part of a pound equipped with treble hooks large enough they resembled a coat rack. These giant blocks of wood he called, "jerk baits," were only worthy of casting if they were fluorescent orange, charteruse lime, or some form of firetiger mix. You needed sun glasses or a welders mask just to look in his tackle box.
One crisp October morning I was asked if would like to take a muskie fishing trip. The outing would consist of two days fishing at approximately eight to nine hours a day. Who could ask for more – the deal was on!
Our first day found me filled with great anticipation. However, after four hours of chunking a two-by-four with no results I began to wonder about this, "Shamu of the North." After nearly nine hours we called it a day. Nothing – zippo – not a fish, not a strike – nada! My friend shrugged and said, "That’s muskie fishing. We will try again tomorrow."
The next morning we started chunking these massive blocks of wood again. Wow, my arms were really sore. Six hours later we still had nothing to show for our efforts. As we started down a broken rock shoreline I took on serious doubts about my friend’s sanity. I looked him in the eye and with a raised voice said, "This is stupid! Muskie – there ain’t no such thing!" He didn’t respond. He just slowly sipped a drink of coffee and hurled his tree of a lure toward the boulder strewn shore.
As we reached the inside turn of that rock shore I made a cast toward a log jam in about eight feet of water and started my retrieve. As the lure reached the boat, a giant fish charged past the bait, cut sideways in the water drenching me in its spray, and smashed into the lure from the side. I yelled and jerked. It couldn’t honestly be said that it was setting the hook. Mostly I just held on. By some miracle the line didn’t break and my buddy got her in the net. A quick measurement found her to be about 47 inches with a weight of around 31 pounds. After a few pictures the pig was released unharmed. Wow! was I pumped. I was shaking like a leaf and stuttering like a 16-year-old with a new credit card at a Cabela’s Grand Opening.
The feeding window had been thrown open! Fifteen minutes later I hooked, fought, but lost a fish that was in the mid- 40 inch range on a live sucker. Twenty minutes after that I hooked, landed, photographed and released another muskie that was 44-inches long on the same jerk bait the first fish came on. What a day!
On the trip home Larry served me up Thanksgiving dinner sized slabs of humble pie smothered in sides of, "I told you so, I told you so."
Having just mouthed off about how, "This is stupid," and, "These fish don’t exist," only a few minutes before this magical hour occurred forced me to choke down huge portions of the humble pie, told-you-so mix. But I must say, humble or not, this pie was some of the sweetest and most satisfying I have ever had the pleasure to eat.
Jason Pence, Annandale, is the pastor of Eagles Grove Church. He enjoys fishing. Muskie season opened Saturday, June 2.