By Ted Pilgrim
Traditions Media

Patience, Petite Tackle and Opening Day Muskies

Eight months is a long time to wait between casts. When the season finally opens in May or June in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ontario, casting withdrawal reaches maximum angst. It’s just the sort of abstinence that can elicit a nasty case of lure charades, that nervous habit that makes certain anglers constantly change baits.

A dude I used to fish with had it bad, manically switching lures in hopes of discovering the one. You know the type. When follows are sparse, lure-changer rotates through whole piles of baits, a new one clipped to the leader every ten casts or so. And most of these anglers carry a boatload.

Now, as a bit of a lure collector myself, I’ve been guilty of the occasional wild experiment, believe me. But most openers, good, bad or otherwise, I mostly limit myself to a couple favorite baits, throwing them uninterrupted for 12-hours. Not that I don’t occasionally get tempted by what ifs.

For my friend, it wasn’t so easy. One winter, he’d accumulated a load of new baits—more ballast for his already over-crowded lure rotation. Things got dicey that particular opening day, as I recall counting 11 different lures clipped to his leader in the space of a single hour’s fishing. Late that afternoon, it looked like a jack-in-the box of baits had exploded all over his casting deck.

What made it surprising is that we’d boated three fair muskies that day, while losing a forth biggie on a furious hook-ejecting headshake. From his perspective, the unfortunate part was that all but one of these had eaten my old brown Grandma’s Lure.

“Maybe if you’d just kept your lures wet a little longer,” I’d offered, trying to be genuinely helpful.

Finally, very late that day, my friend connected when he semi-settled in with a jig and 8-inch plastic Reaper for about 30-minutes of uninterrupted casting. Having by then exhausted 95% of his other players, he was forced to stick with his emergency quarterback for the remainder of the game. “Nice Hail-Mary,” I quipped, again just trying to be supportive. “Imagine if you’d thrown that ugly thing all day.”

Muskie . . . Jigging?

Interesting, indeed, that the single most popular lure category in all of fishing plays such a minor role among muskie hunters. In early season, however, a big jig and plastic tail or a 6- to 9-inch soft plastic Bull Dawg style creature can be an awesome primary presentation. Take the aforementioned 1-ounce jig and 8-inch Reaper and work horizontally across shallow weeds. Or rig a Bondy Bait St. Clair Jig with a big paddletail like a Z-Man Mag SwimZ. Or go weedless with a Bait Rigs Esox Cobra Magnum, dressed with your favorite soft plastic tail. A Red October Ninja Tube and Savage Gear’s Burbot are two creature alternatives that allure early season muskies. For the ultimate in stealth, secure your jigs to 100-lb. test Seaguar AbrazX Musky Pike Leader, the tooth-toughest fluorocarbon ever made.

The beauty of a 1- to 5-ounce jig is that it allows you to retrieve fast over shallow flats, pausing to flutter the lure along drop offs. You can also kill the bait during boatside figure-8 maneuvers—occasionally a spectacular triggering move for following muskies.

Particularly appealing are the rods you can wield—without fatigue—for a full 12-hour day of casting. St. Croix’s Legend Tournament Musky “Downsizer,” a 7-foot 3-inch, 6.9-ounce feather lets you hoist ¾- to 3-ounce jigs, minnow baits and other small lures with precision and finesse, yet provides ample power to drive hooks home. For first-time muskie hunters and folks who prefer to steer clear of backlashes and baitcasters, St. Croix also builds a beautiful muskie spinning rod, a heavy power 8-foot stick in their Premier rod series.

Baby Bucktails

Another early season trend, counter to the current lust for license-plate sized spinners, downsized inline bucktails definitely belong in “the one” category. On opening day and probably all through summer, you can clip a small spinner, such as a Buchertail 500 Tinsel to your leader, never change lures once and proceed to put more muskies in the boat than everyone else. These compact yet heavy blades offer positive cues in abundance—flash, speed, and vibration—and cast effortlessly all day with the aforementioned St. Croix Downsizer rod, a 300 size reel and 50 pound Seaguar Kanzen braid.

If you really want to get funky, try a Baby Beaver, a radical weighted bucktail bait with a molded beaver-like head, tufts of deer hair and a flat, soft, beaver tail. Though the bait measures 12-inches, it pulls through the water with minimal effort, allowing for effortless cranking at slow, medium or super fast retrieves. You can also add a double blade attachment for flash and vibration.

Flingin’ Flies

Intriguing that one of the original reasons anglers chose bucktail as skirting for early in-line baits was its pulse factor. Bucktail provides a beautiful but subtle undulation effect when retrieved through the water. Fly tiers have leaned on this feature forever, and also on the fact that bucktail and certain synthetic similar materials stand up well to toothy bites.

Regardless of reason, fly-fishing for muskies is on the upswing. Rich Belanger of St. Croix Rods says that even if you’re not a full-fledged fly guy, keeping a fly rod and streamer on hand as a throwback bait can be an awesome plan for converting tough to tempt, following fish, particularly in spring and fall.

“A 9-foot, 9 or 10 weight Imperial Fly Rod,” says Belanger, “gives you the power to punch pinpoint casts with 6 to 10 inch streamers, all day. Keeping your fly in the water longer than anyone else is still the deal. And there’s something magic about the natural, rhythmic action of a big streamer. Not a lot of folks have the chutzpah to fly cast for more than a few hours. But in a world where every muskie sees a thousand different lures, an organic looking fly can be a total difference maker.”