So it goes...

This past weekend was spent fishing for muskie with my friends Steve and John, a tradition that is ten years running now, as I mentioned last post. I'll be honest, I had a bad feeling going in. I figured since I got one last year, it was back to the drought.  It turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Within the first hour of the first day, we boated a 40" fish that my buddy hauled in. Then within an hour and a half of that one, I caught a 30" fish while casting. There is nothing quite like catching a muskie casting (as opposed to trolling), so I was elated to not be skunked.  Then, while John was taking my fish off, the bobber started moving on one of the suckers in the water. It was what we call a "doubleheader" in the fishing world; two fish on at the same time. It's something that is almost unheard of in the muskie fishing world.  Because my fish was much tinier than the 40" fish caught earlier, they decided to let me catch t...

I spent much of last weekend fishing for musky in the northern reaches of Wisconsin. The weather was, oddly enough, very fall-like. We left from Waukesha on Thursday morning in a steady drizzle and drove for 5 hours in an almost constant rain. My friend who went with admitted he was in a funk and a bit on the cranky side. We got up to Presque Isle about 2:00 and the rain just kept on coming. It rained so hard and long that we didn't even get a chance to fish on Thursday which was part of the reason behind leaving early. We hung out and watched baseball and football that night with the intention of getting a full day of fishing on Friday. Friday we woke to high 40's and a light rain and winds gusting 20-25 mph. We got our warm clothes on and covered it with our rain gear. We committed to trying one lake and if that was too choppy or slow fishing, we would try another. We stopped in town and got some live bait, sucker minnows that were $7.50 each. (Yikes). These are big fish,...