Anyone who knows me knows that I love fishing. Not just a little, but A LOT! If I have a free weekend you can be pretty sure I'll be out fishing. Cold? No problem. I fish until the line freezes in the reels and then I have to stop until the ice gets thick enough to switch to ice fishing. When spring comes, as soon as the ice is gone, so am I... fishing.
I'm members of several fishing clubs, ranging from bass to walleye and muskie. It was spring, and while I enjoy bass fishing, this was prime muskie fishing time. The weather was warming, not that it really mattered that much to me, but the water was running in the fifties, which was perfect for the monsters to move up to spawn. While a bass fisherman is happy with a fifteen to twenty-inch fish, the minimum legal size for muskie is thirty-six inches. That amounts to a three-foot long, fifteen to twenty-pound mass of angry muscle and nasty teeth. These fish are so big that some of my baits are longer than the minimum legal keeper size for the fish they are emulating.
Yeah, it was spring muskie tourney time. The local muskie club usually has four each year, two of which are random draw tourneys. They got tired some years ago of the same small number of people winning all the tournaments, so they shifted to this new random draw format. That means that you have no idea who your partner is until just before the fishing starts. This has proven to be extremely popular with the club because it's limited to club members only and it has helped teach many newer fishermen more and better techniques. You never knew if you were getting a partner that was more or less experienced than you.
This trip I was a boatman. That means I supplied the boat and took a partner that didn't have a boat. It varied from year to year if I was a partner or a boatman, but it really didn't matter that much to me. I was comfortable with my boat and really didn't mind almost any partner. If he knew less than I did, I'd teach him some new places and tips and if he was more experienced, I might learn a new bait or presentation or even a hidden secret hot spot. Yeah, it was a win-win for the club and its members.
Weather didn't usually bother me much. Muskie fishing is known for cold blustery weather, which suits my deep V hull just fine. It's a family boat, otherwise known as an open bow cruiser. Of course I've applied quite a few modifications, setting it up so I could fish everything from trolling for salmon on Lake Michigan to fishing crappie on a little conservation lake with my grandkids. If the wind comes up, or a sudden storm? No problem. My boat is outfitted with complete running canvas so I can close it up like a tent with clear windows, which I have done on a number of occasions, sleeping in my boat overnight.
This particular trip I wasn't worried about a cold blustery day. In fact, the crazy weather was anything but normal or cold. Here it was the second week of March and the forecast was for warm. The day before they forecast sixty five and it beat that by ten degrees and it felt much hotter in the sun. Today they were forecasting seventy and I wondered if it would push the ol' mercury even higher. Unfortunately it was still only about forty five degrees as we waited around to draw our partners, the sun still a good half hour from coming up. I was wearing under armor long underwear under my jeans, a sweat shirt, a heavy jacket, a stocking cap and wind proof winter gloves. I knew damn well that with a thirty-minute run up the lake to where I planned on starting to fish, even behind the windshield, it would be a damn cold ride.
I'd tried to get my wife excited about fishing, but she just wasn't into it. Some wives were, but my wife...not so much. She had long since decided that she wouldn't complain about my leaving the house at four am to go fishing, not coming home again until after dark, as long as I didn't complain about her heading out shopping with her friends. Personally I never quite understood how she could wander around stores for hours on end, try on dozens of dresses or slacks or shirts, and come home with only one or two items. When I went shopping it was in and out. Maybe half an hour to pick half a dozen pair of pants and I was ready to go home.
I waited in line, moving forward one person at a time, the guys in front of me each dipping their hand into the jar to pull out a name. They'd call the name out to find their partner and then head to their boat to get organized. I was toward the end of the line, not for any particular reason. I mean someone had to be at the end, and this morning I chose to pour myself a fresh cup of coffee before walking to the draw line. "Emily Killian!" I called as I pulled the name out.
I wasn't overly surprised it was a woman. Like I said, a lot of wives fished with their husbands. Some even enjoyed fishing more when they weren't fishing with their husbands. Sometimes the husbands can be kind of know-it-all and bossy, where if the wives fished with someone else they were treated better.
I was pretty sure I'd met Emily, not so much because I remembered her name, but because I'd seen her at one of the club's summer bar-b-ques turning the heads of the older guys and even a few younger guys. You couldn't tell it by what she had on now, a heavy jacket, snow pants, stocking cap and mittens. She clearly knew what was coming! She was also a serious fisherman, or maybe I should say fisher woman. She had three rods that were well used and a huge assortment of massive muskie baits. I helped her carry her gear down to the dock and loaded it into my boat, and then held a hand out for her to step down in.
We pushed off the dock and I fired the big I/O, carefully backing away from the dock and then idling out into the bay. We couldn't leave yet. In fact, we weren't until the second flight, meaning a bunch of boats were going to be headed out to the lake a full minute ahead of us.
"So, what's the plan?" she asked as she sat in the passenger seat to my left, waiting patiently for the first flight to take off.
"I was thinking up by north creek. There's some good flats that the big boys should be cruising on at first light," I answered her.
"Yeah. I know where you mean. Back in that long finger bay?"
"That's the one. They're a bitch to hook with top waters like that, especially this close to spawn, but if we can nail one it's likely to make the big fish award. I've gotten some high forties in there."
"Sweet. I've thrown up in there but never come away with a fish."
"What did you use?"
"Buzzers and fox tails mostly."
"Never tried a jerk bait in there?"
"Not really."
"Well, I have an extra spook you can try if you want," I said as I dropped the boat in gear to idle closer to the line as the first flight hit the throttle and raced off onto the lake, some headed north and some south.
"Sure," she answered as I idled closer to the line as the second flight started inching toward the launch line. We saw the green flag fly and I hit the throttle, my big deep V launching up on top of the water and leaving a huge wake behind me, unlike the bass boats which skimmed across the tops of the waves with very little wake. I couldn't go seventy or more like most of them could, but my deep V would cut through rough water that would batter a bass boat to fiberglass splinters.
By the time we got to the fishing hole I was cold and Emily didn't look any too comfortable. There was also already a boat in our fishing hole, but it was clearly working its way around toward the far shore and looked like they were headed out rather than in. I idled down and crept into the long narrow bay, keeping my speed as low as I could on the big engine until we were only a hundred yards or so from the back end. I shut the engine down, tilted up the out drive so we could go in shallower water and put down my two thousand-dollar wireless remote electric trolling motor.
I pulled my gloves off and dug into one of the huge plastic boxes for a pair of baits, handing one to Emily and keeping one for myself.
