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Sometimes in muskie fishing, all you have to show for your efforts are a shredded lure and a bloodied hand. But having your hands cut up is a small price to pay for landing a memorable fish.

Sometimes in muskie fishing, all you have to show for your efforts are a shredded lure and a bloodied hand. But having your hands cut up is a small price to pay for landing a memorable fish.

I had been waiting what seemed like months for a chance to go muskie fishing. Something always came up — houses to list and show, weather changes that never materialized or the latest, a swollen and intermittently locking finger on my right hand.

Although we have muskies here in West Michigan, most of my hours spent muskie fishing are in the Upper Peninsula.

Of course I fish Hamlin but it’s still considered low-density water. I do get the chance to fish the Elk-Torch-Skegemog chain with a friend up north at times, but those trips are few and far between.

I finally had enough of my own excuses and headed out Sunday.

There was a front coming in, allegedly. If you’re familiar with life along Lake Michigan, you know what I mean by allegedly.

The last one I tried to fish fizzled and this one was looking like it might do the same — or come in hours later than predicted.

In about 20 years of muskie fishing, there’s much more that I haven’t figured out than what I have figured out.

But what I’ve figured out is this: Weather matters more than anything else. More than moon phase, more than color, more than bait selection and possibly even more than speed.

Why? I would theorize that because a muskies only real predators after it reaches about three feet long attack from above.

It’s not worried about pike or other muskies or turtles or otters anymore when it gets that big.

Also, you’re chasing a fish that goes after prey that’s roughly half its length.

A legal muskie is 42 inches and they get much bigger than that, so they’re eating 20-plus-inch meals.

Those take a while to digest.

They’re lazy. They eat when they’re hungry, but they eat when it’s easy.

I heard a podcaster make the analogy of a bag of chips.

If they’re in the living room, next to the recliner, you’re going to eat them. If they’re in the kitchen, you’re not going to get up for them. That’s muskie behavior.

Storm fronts put the chips next to the recliner. They darken the sky and get the whole food chain moving.

When everything is moving, big muskies perk up.

I mentioned lakes above. It doesn’t matter what lake you’re on, but for the rest of the year your main job is to find green weeds.

Shortening days, cold weather and algae blooms all kill weeds. Weeds produce oxygen.

The whole food chain needs oxygen to survive so green weeds attract everything.

The first spot I tried was not wind-blown, but it had been in previous days. For years I’ve been writing that the wind collects the bait.

On Sunday, that was evident.

The bait was pooled up in one spot.

I thought for sure I had a great fishing spot, but hours of casting with a double-bladed spinner, a big rubber bait and a Suick produced not even a bump.

When a day is a good day, I at least expect a bass or a pike.

The water temperature was 73 degrees.

The muskie playbook says that we should be throwing fast-moving lures in that temp.

But the barometric pressure was over 30.

The muskie playbook says we should slow down and fish something erratic.

Well, I had both bases covered and nothing to show for it.

My next spot was an audible. I had marked a nice fish there once before and I had seen a big fish — either pike or muskie — behind my lure on a similar day.

I found weeds deeper than I thought I would in this spot – normally my go-to is 9-to-12-feet of water.

I realized I had used three of my four rods and I still needed to test the T-handle I put on my fourth rod.

The “Outdoor Grips Jig Ripper” is an attachment that you can put on the foregrip of your casting rod that eases finger pain from palming a baitcasting reel.

I had ordered one a couple years ago and used it intermittently, but with this injury and my fall fishing coming up, I picked up a couple more used ones and mounted them to rods.

This particular rod (Chaos Tackle Surgical Strike) is kind of my in-between rod for spring spinners and crankbaits and small rubber lures.

So I dug into the tackle box.

And staring up at me from one of the slots was a Storm Thunderbeast. It’s not the biggest lure, but it has a unique action. The tail is like a giant Mr. Twister tail that, to me, moves better than other rubber lure tails do – it takes less action to make it move and then it snaps back into its molded shape as soon as it stops moving.

I tried maybe 20 casts with this lure, working to get its action just right.

It’s a little light, so in the heavy waves it was running intermittently shallow. I forced myself to slow down.

Finally, my finger was throbbing, my wrist was aching and I was ready to hang it up.

I hadn’t heard from my buyers yet, but I knew I had an afternoon home showing to prepare for.

Laugh if you want, but you know we all do it and I did it on this cast. I said “one more cast,” because you really can’t leave the water without saying it.

I would love to tell you he hit like a freight train, but that’s not how rubber strikes go.

I felt a tick — decidedly harder than a tick of a bass taking a tube jig, but still, just a tick.

I reared back into a hookset and that’s when I felt the freight train.

He broke water, shook his head and showed his nearly four feet of gold body.

cranked hard while I fumbled around the boat trying to decide whether to stomp on the spot lock or to shut off the motor entirely.

I ended up doing both.

By the time I set the spot lock, he was here and I had to turn off the trolling motor so it wouldn’t eat my line.

The boat pitched even more in the two-foot waves as the 20 mph winds riled the lake and the motor released its grip on our position.

I walked him around the boat and realized the fight felt shorter than it should have been.

This fish was gassed already.

I grabbed my net and had about five false-starts at netting him.

Finally, he was laying alongside the boat and I scooped him.

If I had been with anyone else, it would have been high-fives all around.

Instead, my thoughts swirled as I looked at this giant and said “now what?”

I tried to get my pliers into the hooks.

The boat kept pitching and the fish kept thrashing so it was a struggle.

What could be simpler than grabbing a hook with a pair of pliers? In hindsight, I realize the third complicating factor was that I was still shaking while I tried to do all this — think about the tremors you get after you drop a big buck.

I got the pliers on the hook once or twice, only to have him thrash away.

I contemplated trying to cut the hooks, but that would take time and I felt like I didn’t have it.

A fish this big, to me, is a treasure and not something to be wasted.

They say you should only have them out of the water as long as you can hold your breath.

He was in the water, in the net, but he was stressed and I was stressing.

With a ferocious headshake and me holding the pliers, he freed himself from the lure.

I let him sit and breathe for a minute or so before I lifted him up to the sticker on my boat gunwale — the laughably long ruler I never thought I’d need when they started stocking these fish 15 years ago.

It confirmed what I already knew. He was big — my biggest yet.

I lowered him and let him sit in the net while I fumbled to get the lure out of the netting.

He was intermittently upright, so my attention was divided.

I finally said forget it and unhooked the lure from the line, leaving it hanging in the net.

I got my rod out of the way, got the fish upright and made sure his gills were still moving.

I was not going to kill this fish. A fish this big in West Michigan is probably 8-10 years old if it’s a female and older if it’s a male.

I fooled with the lure in the net while the fish started showing signs of life.

I was getting close to getting the lure out entirely when the fish saw the lip of the net dip low, gave a kick of his tail and swam off.

So there I was in the middle of the lake, bobbing up and down, with half a lure in my hand and an empty net.

And I realized, this was the biggest fish I ever caught and I never got his picture.

The big one getting away never felt so good.

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