While much of my time revolves around the Bassmaster Elite Series schedule that has me traveling all over America for over half the year, I do love to fish for species other than bass, get in the boat with good friends and simply be on the water. Heck, like most of you reading this across Canada, I even look forward to ice fishing. So when the opportunity pops up to get in the boat with good friends and do something different, I’m all over it.
Over the past few years my pal Doug Wegner and I had tried to hook up and go fishing, both for muskies and for lake trout through the ice. Doug is the best musky angler I’ve been in the boat with and when he sent me a message one day last fall wondering if my wife Shelby and I wanted to jump in the boat with he and his wife Jessie Baker, we were in. They are just fun people to hang out with.
Doug and Jessie live across the lake from us, near Morson, Ontario. By road, it’s a few hours to drive around the lake so we left the evening before we were planning to fish and spent the night at their place. It was good to catch up and we stayed up later than we should have in advance of the first light boat launch that Doug said we were doing. This trip happened in late October so the days were starting to get short and the morning wasn’t to early.
We launched the boat, bundled up and ran about 15 minutes up the lake to our first spot, a main lake point that they had seen quite a few muskies on in the past. We split up duties, casting lures and large soft plastics. One or two of us would keep an eye on the electronics and the others would just fish. Our goal on the day was to catch a few muskies but we would catch whatever else we ran into as well.
It took a few spots to get into a rhythm with four of us in the boat before Doug hooked up with the first musky of the day, a nice mid-40” fish on a soft swimbait. My first couple of bites came from pike, which is usually how the musky trips go for me, I catch all the pike! We did hook up several nice pike throughout the day, which kept us on our toes.
Doug’s boat is a Lund 219 Pro-V GL, powered by a Mercury Verado four-stroke motor. He has it rigged up with a number of Humminbird screens and a Minn Kota trolling motor on the bow that he can run with a remote from the back of the boat. This is common for musky anglers, especially guides, who can let their guests cast off the front and have the big deck to work from. Doug spends much of his year guiding for muskies and walleyes, this boat is the dream rig for fishing the big water that he does. Four of us were comfortable in the boat all day.
By mid-day we were up to a couple of muskies and a half dozen pike, pretty good action. I found myself checking out all of the good looking bass stuff in the south end of the lake that I’m not as familiar with but I didn’t bring a lot of bass tackle with me. In the early afternoon, Doug noticed a school of walleye of the end of a point that we fished for muskies. He is hardcore and kept casting for big fish but the rest of us picked up the walleye rods with some Ned rigs tied on and started catching walleyes. If I am musky fishing all day, I’m all for taking a little break from the big sticks to catch some bass or walleyes. Throwing those big baits is a workout!
The walleye fishing was pretty good. We caught some eating sized fish as well as a few big ones. One of the stranger things that I’ve ever seen happened while we were catching walleyes. Jessie caught a really nice one, maybe around 26” or 27”. She caught it, we took a few photos and then released it. Maybe five minutes later, I caught a nice walleye and we followed the same routine. Later that night when we were looking at the photos, we realized that the walleye she caught and the one I caught a few minutes later, was the same fish, from around 24 feet of water. We noticed a few marks on the fish were exactly the same. Sometimes they aren’t as smart as we think they are!
As the afternoon wore on, we had follows from several muskies, a few missed opportunities and we caught more pike. Later in the afternoon we pulled up to one of Jessie’s favourite spots and it had a bunch of fish on it. A long bar, where we caught another musky and a few more pike to go along with follows from a couple more muskies. It was pretty steady action and one of the first times I’ve seen a school of these big predators together.
We stayed on the water until dark and it was one of those days that we’ll all remember for a long time. The fishing was great, we got some beautiful weather, we learned and we had fun. That’s why we go fishing right?!? We made a plan to do it again this fall on the north end of the lake and this time Shelby and I will be the hosts.
