My Aspirations

My aspirations are not complicated.  I’ll tell it to you now, I intend on catching a true world weight-class record muskie.  Someone please explain to me why this isn’t a possibility.  Detailing all my collegiate and professional education and my personal studies about fish, coupled with my personal water-time (1600 days on the water (I am 28)), I absolutely know that a 70 pound muskie does roam the waters of Northern Wisconsin.   

I think that the growth potential for musky is completely misunderstood, creating a mythical misnomer when the subject is ever brought up.  The potential for fish growth is underrated to the point where it makes me sick.  How is it even possible to say that she does not exist, and not only one, but several record fish?

Isn’t it retarded to think that a record fish once existed and doesn’t anymore?  What has changed?  Nothing!  And there being more fishermen presently is erroneous.

Catching 40”, 50” muskie is considered awesome, and I must agree 100 percent.  But people have to realize very simple ideas about biology.  What makes a creature old?  Answer – not dying.  What does an old creature do?  Answer - keep living.  How do they do that?  Rely on past experience and conditioned responses. 

Past experience, or conditioned response, creates an environment where a successful animal works off maximum body efficiency.  And in terms of giant fish, that relates to ultimate extreme efficiency, or as I like to call it, nearly impossible to catch.  I hope you like the word ‘nearly’.  These extreme big fish target food very differently than do sub-50”ers; they know what’s up.  Could you imagine a 60# musk eating bucktail or suiks her whole life with no consequence?  Nah.  Because a 60# fish isn’t going to exist where people fish, and if by chance she does, she’s not going to eat a lure seen a million times before.

It’s going to exist where people don’t fish.  Not only that, a 60+ pounder only eats during one season of the year, then lays dormant the rest.   They likely eat food starting immediately when the fall surface temperature becomes cold enough to drop and mix with the lower layers of lake…when baitfish find it suitable to seek shallow water, creating an easy seining adventure for the most robust musk.  It becomes an overindulgent slaughter.  

Big fish are big fish for one reason, and that reason is the food supply is such where it is predictable and not expensive on the fishes body.  Less stress = more growth.  I’m not implying that high traffic lakes don’t hold nice muskies, or that every private lake holds a giant fish.  I just want to say that sometimes there is a perfect combination of elements, and I’m excited about that.   

I may not fish for her everyday, and I may not know where she is, but she’s out there.  I am totally convinced that she exists, and am totally consumed by thinking about where.  6/26/2012