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| Nick "The Fish Nazi" Prevus with a 52-inch Dryberry muskie. |
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A SIMPLE PLAN
by Bob Chochola
MUSKIE Magazine (August 2005)
Imagine you are packing your gear getting ready to head for musky country. It’s your favorite time of year and you are on your way to a lake you know like the back of your hand – a lake you have done very well on in the past.
Now imagine there is a catch to this trip…
You may only bring ONE lure with you. That’s right, you get just one lure. Get up and go to your bait collection right now. Open all of your tackle boxes and take a peek inside each one. See if anything in your vast array of taste tempters and hog teasers jumps out at you screaming, “I’m the one!” Go on, I’ll wait for you.
Well, any luck?
This little drill may seem a bit far-fetched, but what lure would you pick if you could only pick one? Your answer just might turn you on to a big fish. I have found that the more I fish for muskies, the fewer lures I pack each time out. In the beginning I thought it would be different, I thought it would be the other way around? In the beginning ALL my lures would scream, “I’m the one!” Over the years I have used them all and it's different for me now.
I can remember my first trip to The Chip in Hayward, Wisconsin more than seventeen years ago. My group settled-in for our first night and I would get my first taste of musky hunting the next morning. Too excited to sleep, I wandered over to the local watering hole with a buddy to wet my whistle. Sitting over a half-consumed brew and a greasy burger I spotted a strange novelty item suspended by braid over the bar – a beer bottle with three gigantic treble hooks dangling from it.
At the time I thought the decoration was funny, but have since come to find many musky lures that rival the beer bottle bruit. Heck, I’ve seen ‘em built like a Louisville Slugger with as many as five hooks. I can go to the internet and pull-up thousands of different lures on display and all with one goal – to catch fishermen. You thought I was gonna say “fish” didn’t you?
I was certainly hooked. By the time I went on my third trip I had three boxes full of baits. By trip number five – you got it, five full boxes. My collection grew and grew until I had so many lures it was impossible to think that I could use even a small portion of it in a week’s time.
Suddenly it happened on a trip to Dryberry, Ontario. No feat of greatness came out of me. No super-human effort to tell you about. No brilliant detective work was done on my part to uncover the mystery of musky. It was maybe just a lucky shot in the dark – like a winning Mega Million ticket? After three very hot and sunny days without so much as a follow, a sudden wind change brought with it thick cloud cover. I decided to change lures too and I made a change that would improve my success rate dramatically for a long time to come.
I grabbed a shad color jerk bait out of a crowd of baits I had hanging within arm’s reach and put it on my leader. On the first cast I caught a nice pike. A few minutes later I had another nice pike actually blow-up and grab the bait as it hit the water on a cast. Then at dusk I bagged a 48-inch musky. Pay dirt!
Now I realize that much of my success that evening had to do with the weather change, but right about now you would have had to club me over the head to get that lure off the end of my line. I kept the magic bait on that rod for the next few days and boated a 51-inch musky; two more lunge near the 40-inch mark, and a bunch of nice pike too. Finally I had one lure that was unlike all the rest in my collection. It was different because I had confidence I could catch fish with it. Confidence is the operative word and point of this story.
I had been fishing musky a good long time before this light bulb moment. I had a number of lures that had caught fish, but none with such frequency and none that had what seemed to be an ability to attract some real monsters. This bait had what I call musky mojo and it was my first real confidence lure.
What about this particular lure made it irresistible to big muskies? What made it work better than even other lures just like it? Why did I catch so many fish with it, while others who used the same bait in the same color didn’t have anywhere near the same success that I did?
I have a couple of explanations…
First of all, there is what I could not control. Buy a thousand of the same lure and not one will run the same way as the others. Don’t ask me why? It would seem they all come from the same assembly line and should be identical, but hey are not. Every now and then you find one that runs just right – right out of the box. This lure was perfect every cast and I have tried many just like it and even with adjustments none have been munched the same way.
Second (and this is much more important), my jerk bait was the product of a company started by a well known musky guide in Wisconsin, whom I hired once upon a time when I was learning the sport. It was pretty much a prototype back then. I went out with him one day and he had me throw the bait all day. As luck would have it I didn’t catch squat, but he caught several fish using one. I watched him work that lure for a long time slamming his rod tip hard with short jerks and tapping his foot like he was keeping time to music. From then on that is exactly how I worked it – like no one else I’ve ever seen – short hard and fast pulls made that lure dart and dance in the water with a very erratic motion. Conventional use of most jerk type baits is long deliberate pulls, but he was truly “jerking” the heck out of it.
Reluctantly I retired my prize lure prior to last season after many strikes and big fish stories. I had to because my beloved workhorse was chewed beyond recognition: the paint was gone, scratches covered it front to back, and tiny tooth holes allowed water to fill the hollow plastic chamber making it impossible to work correctly. I still bring it with me on every trip – as superstitious as it may seem, I always like to keep the musky mojo in my boat.
As luck (or mojo) would have it, I stumbled upon a new confidence lure right away. Let me say that it is a lure that has been working very well for my whole group for years, but last fall it came through big on Lake Dryberry for us. I’m not gonna be too specific here, I’ll just call it a “big bucktail” and let you do your own legwork. Hey, if I tell you and you strike out, you’ll blame me. If you catch a whole bunch of fish with it, everyone else who sees this article will blame me. So, for specifics you are on your own.
My lucky grab in the old lure stash this time was the first one I tied on last fall. It was day one of a two-week adventure and little did I know I would have this big bucktail attached to my eight-foot St. Croix the rest of the trip. It’s true! I had one other rod in the boat and I maybe threw a dozen casts a day with it, no more. After that it was entirely up to buck.
What’s even more interesting is that my partner used the same big bucktail (same color & blade too) with as great of frequency as I did for two weeks. By the time the dust settled and we were heading home we logged two 51.5-inchers, a 50.5-incher, a 47-incher, a few smaller muskies, and some nice pike too – all on the same lure.
Go ahead and ask me what lure I’d take if I could only take one?
Are any of your lures talkin’ to you yet?
Confidence is key and when you find that jewel in the rough, give it a serious test to see if it’s for real or if it was a one-time strike. I’ll bet you have the musky mojo going on in one of your tackle boxes right now?
It’s all about keeping it simple. I live in Texas and musky country is a long airplane ride (plus an even longer car ride after that) away from home. Carrying multiple tackle boxes is not an option for someone looking to scale-down on gear. Of course, my partner brings an assortment of lures, but last year we hardly cracked a tackle box open.
Look for lures you know produce. Watch other anglers who are successful to see what they are using. Pay attention to them as they work their lures and note how every cast will have a consistent rhythm. Sometimes your partner is a good resource. If the guy on the other end of the boat is doing things right and you are not you’ll certainly know, because you’ll be doing more net work than casting.
Take stock of the lures in your collection. Do any of them represent greater success than all the others? I have certain lures that work: I work them correctly and they work correctly for me. These are usually proven fish catchers and I stick with them because they give me confidence in my attack. A well-selected lure is a beautiful thing, but sometimes it seems the lure selects you. I was selected one fine cloudy day when I made the right choice and found my magic jerk bait. Now I have my big bucktail and hopefully I will have more to write about very soon.
Grab your confidence lure and let’s go musky fishin’!
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