Reports

Guided Mark I. for a full-day of musky fishing.  We started our day as the only boat at the launch or on the lake at 8 pm.  The goal is to get fish on the fly.  Today we had west winds gusting into the 30 mph range, so conditions were far from ideal for fly-fishing.  The leaves weren’t bad.  Water temp was around 56.  The water level was down at least 2′ from a couple of weeks ago.  The lake is LOW.  A lot of the weed growth that was on the lake when I was last here on October 2nd and 10th is gone.

Mark gave the fly-fishing three hours but we never saw a fish or had any hits.  His casting and presentations were top-notch.  After that, he went to gear.  When Mark comes along, I bring a couple of my tried and true spoon set-ups in order to not clutter up the boat, since usually he’ll fly-fishing for at least 5 hours of the 8-hour day.  Had I known that he would have spent the next 5 hours casting gear, I might have brought some other presentations along, perhaps something more subtle.

Highpoint of the day was a hit while Mark was just starting his figure-8 with the spoon.  The water was murky and I didn’t get a good look at the fish but I did see a brownish flash.  I spot-locked the boat and grabbed the net.  Was it a musky?  Nope.  It was a chunky 18″ smallmouth that hit hit just before the figure-8 at the boat!  We were both happy with that fish.  We really gave it our all today and worked a lot of prime areas.  I had him fish areas I rarely work as well as areas that have been solid producers over the years.  We had the new moon, but sometimes the best day is the day right before the front comes in, which would have been yesterday.  Who knows?  Musky fishing can be puzzling.  We had a myriad of different conditions today with heavy, moderate and light winds out of various directions along with sun and clouds and so on.  It can be hard to figure!