Musky America Magazine

We started out early on this June day. We did a couple of ‘tune up’ spots to ‘introduce’ Dave to Musky tackle and boat etiquette and then we were out working the fishing circuit that Rob and I had developed over the days before Dave’s arrival. We fished the morning hard without any action, so we stopped at Deerfoot Resort for "The Best Hamburger in the World" and to develop an afternoon fishing strategy. After lunch we worked Pork Barrel, Little Pete’s and Pocketbook without success and the expectation that Rob and I had about ‘always’ having action with a ‘New Guy’ in the boat began to wane. I decided to motor over to a little piece of backwater structure that had produced some action earlier in the week, hoping that we could get some action to excite Dave’s adrenal gland. We motored up on the spot and started a slow troll along a fishy shoreline, sneaking up on the ‘hotspot’ of the point of this tucked away alcove. We had Dave throwing a surface bait while Rob and I were tossing bucktails. As we worked across the front of the point pocket, my bucktail stopped dead. I yelled that I had a fish and Rob and Dave reeled in their lures. I heard Dave ask Rob what he should do and Rob’s reply was "Just try to stay out of the way"…his instruction to Dave was prophetic. The Musky at the end on my line was putting up a bit of a tussle, stripping line off my reel as he tried to toss the lure. About that time, it came out of the water with gills in full flare and doing a violent head shake. I kept my rod down in an attempt to keep tension on the line as the fish re-entered the water about 10 feet

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