dictate travel time. Whether successful or unsuccessful during the early morning excursion, the typical angler will take a food break and then start the cycle all over again. This "fish-travelprepare-fish" cycle will continue throughout the day. When you take into consideration the aforementioned, it is easy to conclude that an angler day (actual casting time) is between 8 and 10 hours. For the purpose of this article, we will adopt the 10 hour angler day. That means that at the rate of 1 legal Muskie per 135 hours, it will take an angler 13.5 days to achieve a legal Muskie catch assuming that you are not fishing on water that has an upper 40 or 50 inch size limit. Well, how are YOU doing? Do you catch more than 1 legal Muskie every 13.5 days? Are you fishing for Muskie more than 13.5 days per Muskie season? There are probably as many different answers to these questions as there are visitors to the website. Here's an additional thing to consider. What about fishing pressure? How many anglers are competing for the same population of Muskie on a body of water? Typically, the DNR relies upon creel surveys as an indicator of fishing pressure. Creel surveys, however, are NOT a very accurate assessment of fishing competition. The Wisconsin DNR creel survey, for example, for the Chippewa Flowage for the 1990 Muskie season reported that there were 250,000 angler hours asserted by the creel survey that were focused upon muskellunge. When you consider that the typical season is 165 days in length and you then apply the 10 anglers hours to each of those days you get 1,650 angler hours per season. If you apply 1,650 angler hours (aforementioned) to the 250,000 muskellunge angler hours, you find that it would take 152 muskellunge anglers fishing non-stop for 10 hours a day for 165 days to accumulate the 250,000 hours
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