no time getting back, where he very rudely grabbed the rod out of my hand right in the middle of a cast! When I went back up onto the bridge, Jack said I had been laying it all around them but they never even looked at it. This guy could handle a rod and was laying it right in there too but, like Jack said, the two muskies paid no heed. "After watching for a while, we decided to start back towards Black Lake. We had only gone perhaps 400 or 500 feet, when the fellow hollered, 'Come and help me, I got one on!' So we ran back. Jack took one quick look and cut the man a nice club. The fisherman didn't want to wade out into that cold water but we both told him, if he expected to land that fish, he was going to have to get way out there. So he waded out about hip deep. "He knew how to fight a fish alright. Got him up finally and cracked him on the head, waited a few seconds until after the fish had his last little struggle, and then took him by the gills and brought him ashore. It was probably 38 or 40 inches long. It was certainly a nice little Musky." So right then and there, one Louie Spray had learned the lesson of all Musky lessons: persistence pays off. Or' as my friend Bruce Tasker has always said, "You've got to fish it clean." I believe it was during a late August morning in 1979 when I first heard this casual utterance from Bruce as he knowingly oared his 1 6-foot Shell Lake guide boat along the edge of one of the Chippewa Flowage's many prime shallow water Musky bars. And while the importance of this soft-spoken directive might not have been recognized by others, something in the way this sagely, white-haired Musky man spoke those words seemed to indicate that what Bruce said was worth remembering.
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