Well there must be something about Sunday. Thus far in my life, every time I catch one of the toothy fellahs, itās on a Sunday. I had lines in the water by about 8:30 this morning. Trolling outer bay looking for pike and musky. Shortly after 12:00 Mother Erie smiled down on me. I had just wound in my line dispose of a bit of salad and was letting my line back out. The last time I looked at the reel counter it said 77 ft. Then all hell broke loose! Line started peeling off like crazy. It almost pulled the rod out of my hand. I started tightening the drag to slow whatever it was down and try to gauge how big this fish was. Once I realized it was a biggun, I had about 122 ft of line out and decided to keep the drag loose enough to prevent some part of my rig from letting go. At one point there was 228 feet of line out. After a bit, I made some headway and then, after a few more runs, I stated to get the upper hand. It took about 15 minutes to get it close enough to see it and another 5 minutes to get it along side the boat. There was no way this thing was going to fit into my net, the basket was way to shallow. I put my rod into the vertical holder to free up both hands and used my lip gripper in one hand and grabbed the leader with the other to get this bad girl into the boat.
She was 48 inches long. My lip gripperās built -in scale goes up to 30 pounds and that was not near enough to get a weight on this one. That would not only be my P.B. for musky, but the biggest fish of my life so far. All in all a thrilling experience - I only peed a little bit.
Again, apologies for the image, I really have to get a mount for my phone. Just to put it into perspective, this one all but completely spanned my boat floor at the transom. That lure protruding from her mouth is my trusty Berkley Hit Stick 15 in ārainbowā pattern. Magic speed was 3.7 mph (GPS), 15 FOW, 65 lb braid only had approx 77 ft of line out flat-lining and in the process of letting more out. The magic happened at around 12:15.
As you might expect, it took a bit to revive her, but she swam off to fight another day. I donāt know which of us was more gassed when all was said and done.
She was 48 inches long. My lip gripperās built -in scale goes up to 30 pounds and that was not near enough to get a weight on this one. That would not only be my P.B. for musky, but the biggest fish of my life so far. All in all a thrilling experience - I only peed a little bit.
Again, apologies for the image, I really have to get a mount for my phone. Just to put it into perspective, this one all but completely spanned my boat floor at the transom. That lure protruding from her mouth is my trusty Berkley Hit Stick 15 in ārainbowā pattern. Magic speed was 3.7 mph (GPS), 15 FOW, 65 lb braid only had approx 77 ft of line out flat-lining and in the process of letting more out. The magic happened at around 12:15.
As you might expect, it took a bit to revive her, but she swam off to fight another day. I donāt know which of us was more gassed when all was said and done.