muskie – Syndication Server

Angler lands huge muskie when last-minute ‘bite window’ opens

After not getting a bite on the first day, two fishermen were nearing the end of the second day of fishing when their luck suddenly changed.

After not getting a bite on the first day, Bill Swanson and his friend were nearing the end of their second day of fishing without a strike when suddenly the “bite window” opened, and didn’t close even as the sun was setting.

Swanson and Vance Kaloz trolled both ends of Chautauqua Lake in New York for nearly two straight days in early November without success before Swanson caught a 46-inch muskie and then lost another one about the same size, as reported by New York Upstate.

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But it wasn’t until the sun began setting and the anglers decided to call it a day when the best fish of the day bit.

“We’re just getting ready to stand up and say, ‘Welp, you know, we gave it heck,’ and all of a sudden the reel went [off],” Swanson told New York Upstate.

“She did two tail splashes and totally drenched both of us in the back of the boat. It was just so great.”

It took Swanson 10 minutes to land the fish, doing so after he had lost his footing during the fight and hit the deck.

They took measurements and estimated its weight at 40 pounds. It was 51-inches long.

“[Vance] just goes all day, every day,” Swanson told New York Upstate. “And that’s the trick to muskie fishing. You gotta be there when that bite window comes.”

Photo courtesy of Bill Swanson.

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Fisherman’s knees buckle upon seeing his ‘super unheard of’ catch

An angler in Toronto Harbor assumed he had hooked a big pike when he felt the weight at the end of the line. Turns out, it was a ‘unicorn.’

A Canadian man fishing in Toronto Harbor assumed he had hooked a big pike when he felt the weight at the end of the line, but when it came to the surface and he saw what it was his knees buckled.

“Once I saw it was a muskie, my knees immediately became like Jello,” Will Sampson told CTV News Toronto. “They just, like, buckled.”

Sampson and a friend were trolling in the harbor and had caught a couple of pike right away. Then, a fish hit his lure that felt heavy. That and the way it was fighting led Sampson to believe it was a big pike, “obviously.”

When he saw the color of the fish, he immediately recognized it as a muskie, which is related to northern pike but is typically a light silver, green or brown color, according to CTV.

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They landed the fish and estimated its weight at just under 20 pounds with a length of 43¼ inches. For comparison’s sake, the world record is 67 pounds, 8 ounces caught on July 1949 in Wisconsin’s Lake Court Oreilles.

“We knew it was a unicorn, like obviously there’s muskie in Lake Ontario, [but] in Toronto Harbor it’s super unheard of,” Sampson told CTV.

Sampson, a fishing guide, has fished his whole life and has caught muskie before, but this was a first for this area.

He told CTV there are lots of muskie at the mouth of the Niagara River and at the other end of Lake Ontario near Kingston.

From CTV:

Muskies once thrived in the waters surrounding the Toronto Islands about 200 years ago, according to the City of Toronto.

“After the arrival of Europeans, a host of changes resulted in the destruction or deterioration of fish habitat,” the city’s ‘Fishes of Toronto’ guide reads.

“A total of 15 exotic fish species were either intentionally introduced for food and recreation, or invaded through navigational canals or ballasts of ocean-going ships. Today, populations of most native fishes have declined dramatically and 10 species have disappeared entirely.”

Incidentally, once he took photos, Sampson released the fish.

Photos courtesy of Will Sampson.

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Catch of giant muskie breaks 25-year-old record

A West Virginia angler who decided to fish for a few hours before a planned grocery run Saturday landed a 51-pound muskie to set a state record for the species.

A West Virginia angler who decided to fish briefly before a planned grocery run Saturday landed a 51-pound muskie to set a state record for the species.

Luke King told ForTheWin Outdoors that he hooked the 55 1/16-inch muskellunge while casting a 6-inch jerkbait from shore below the dam at Burnsville Lake.

The catch beat weight and length records dating to 1997 and 2017, respectively, according to the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources’ website.

“The fight was pretty epic,” said King, who is from Burnsville. “She was big and mean, but ran out of luck after the hook was set. She head-shook for a while on the surface then almost swam right towards me.

“I had one tree I had to steer her around and she came right to my feet. After she thrashed around on the surface I was able to coax her into the net head-first.”

King said a biologist with the WVDNR verified the weight and length of the muskie before King set the fish free.

“Everything was finalized,” he said late Monday. “It’s the state record for both weight and length. It just might take a few days before it’s ‘official.’ ”

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On Tuesday, WVDNR fisheries management specialist Mark Scott told FTW Outdoors: “The fish is not ‘official’ yet as we have to have certain documentation completed. However, unless something unforeseen comes up, I fully expect this fish will be deemed the official record soon.”

On Saturday, King wrote on Facebook that the catch was a “dream come true.”

He was fishing alone when the massive muskie struck, and phoned friends for assistance in taking photographs and keeping the muskie alive. “It was a lucky trip,” he said. “I only planned to fish for a few hours before heading to the store to stock up on groceries.”

For the sake of comparison, the world record for muskie, or muskellunge, stands at 67 pounds, 8 ounces. That fish was caught at Lake Court Oreilles in Wisconsin in 1949.

–Top image shows Luke King (right) with his record muskie

Giant muskie catch on icy lake may have ‘crushed’ 64-year-old record

A Minnesota angler appears to have broken a 64-year-old state record with the nighttime catch of a nearly 56-pound muskie.

“The rumors are true!” Nolan Sprengeler wrote on Facebook after his catch Monday of a 55-pound, 14.8-ounce muskie at Mille Lacs Lake.

The current record, 54 pounds, was set at Lake Winnibigoshish in 1957.

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Sprengeler, 27, of Minnetonka, told FTW Outdoors that he submitted his record application to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources on Tuesday. As of the time of this post he had not heard back from the agency.

Sprengeler told KARE 11 that he and some buddies were enjoying perhaps the final night of fishing before the lake becomes too ice-covered to fish from a boat. The air temperature was 18 degrees as they broke through ice near the marina to access deeper water.

Sprengeler has been pursuing the catch-and-release record (57-1/4 inches) for weeks. But the muskie he landed Monday, “after a quick battle and a few ridiculous head shakes,” was deep-hooked and not responsive during the release attempt.

“I didn’t realize how giant this fish was until I pulled it out of the net and immediately called Kevin [Kray] over to assist with the buddy pictures,” Sprengeler wrote. “It measured an incredible 57.75” in length with a 29” girth.

“The next hour or so was spent trying to get her to release. Eventually we realized this was not going to happen and made the decision to bring it to a certified scale and crush the Minnesota State Record.”

On Tuesday, the fish was weighed at a UPS Store in Golden Valley.

For the sake of comparison, the International Game Fish Assn. lists as the all-tackle world record a 67-pound, 8-ounce muskie caught at Wisconsin’s Lake Court Oreilles in 1949.

–Top image shows Nolan Sprengeler (left) and Kevin Kray posing with the giant muskie

Swimmer attacked by muskie while training for triathlon

A triathlete from Ontario, Canada, learned a painful lesson recently while swimming in Lake St. Clair: Muskies might mistake your extremities as prey, and they have dangerously sharp teeth.

A triathlete from Ontario, Canada, learned a painful lesson recently while swimming in Lake St. Clair: Muskies might mistake your extremities as prey, and the fish have dangerously sharp teeth.

Matt Gervais, 39, was bitten on the right hand Aug. 13 as he trained for an upcoming event with a friend. “It was a lot of pain [and] it hurt really bad, right away,” he told CTV News.

Gervais was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where he received 13 stitches. He’s still awaiting clearance to resume training.

Gervais said that after the muskie struck he looked down and saw that it was still latched onto his hand.

“I caught it eye to eye, underwater with my goggles,” Gervais said, adding that what he saw after the fish let go was “carnage.”

Trevor Pitcher, a professor at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, told CTV News that the muskie probably mistook Gervais’ hand for a small fish.

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“The word ‘mistake’ is key because we’re very confident that they don’t intentionally bite people,” Pitcher said. “In reality it’s not very common so humans – and especially human flesh – [are] not part of the muskie diet.”

Gervais, of Windsor, told the Windsor Star: “Some crazy things have happened to me while training, but this is probably the craziest.”

Muskies, or muskellunge, are found throughout much of the northeastern U.S. and as far south as Georgia.

The fish are apex predators wherever they occur and strike with remarkable speed and ferocity, making them incredibly popular among anglers.

According to the International Game Fish Assn., the world record has stood at 67 pounds, 8 ounces, since 1949. That muskie was caught at Lake Court Oreilles in Hayward, Wisconsin.

Angler’s catch of record muskie a ‘shock,’ and a testament to habitat work

With his big muskie catch, a fisherman in West Virginia helped prove the habitat work being done in Burnsville Reservoir is effective.

A fisherman in West Virginia helped prove the habitat work being done in Burnsville Reservoir is effective by catching a muskie that was certified as a state record for length.

Chase Gibson, a fishing guide who was fishing with a friend at the lake between Clarksburg and Charleston, landed a 54-inch muskellunge that weighed 39.6 pounds, as reported by Gibson’s Guide Service and WFXR-TV.

The fish surpassed the old mark of 53.5 inches (a 34.58-pounder) caught by Joe Wilfong in the Little Kanawha River in 2017.

“I’m still in shock,” Gibson wrote on the Facebook post about the catch.

Gibson told WFXR-TV he was fishing a timbered cove with a lot of crappie suspended on the timber, and that it was barely hooked with one treble in the corner of its mouth.

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“It didn’t take very long to get her in the net,” Gibson told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors. “She ran straight to the boat and did almost wrap me around a tree and my trolling motor. But as soon as I got around those obstacles my good friend Frank Porupski was ready to scoop her up.”

Gibson recognized it could be a record, so he phoned West Virginia Division of Natural Resources to certify the catch while keeping the fish submerged in his large net alongside his boat.

Biologist Aaron Yeager responded and certified the fish as a record for length, then tagged and released it.

“It feels humbling to catch a fish of that size in West Virginia,” Gibson told FTW Outdoors.

It was also a proud moment for Yeager, who is one of the biologists who manages the fisheries at Burnsville where the primary goal is expanding fish-holding areas.

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“The record is a testament to the habitat work we’ve done for that reservoir,” Yeager told WFXR-TV.

“Think how cool it would be if another angler hooks that fish in the fall and sets a new state record.”

Burnsville Reservoir is also known for its huge crappie and population of largemouth bass.

Photos courtesy of Gibson’s Guide Service.

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Ice angler hauls 4-foot tiger muskie through 8-inch hole

For Joshua Stratmann, fighting the massive tiger muskie he hooked recently on New York’s Otisco Lake was only the first challenge.

For Joshua Stratmann, fighting the massive tiger muskie he hooked recently on New York’s Otisco Lake was merely the first challenge. A far more difficult task was hauling the nearly 4-foot fish through an 8-inch hole in the ice.

“I had to reach into the hole and grab the fish by its gills,” Stratmann, 40, told Syracuse.com. “It took three tries. The first two, it fell back into the hole. The third time I got it halfway out, bear-hugged it and fell over backward on the ice laughing. It was wild.”

Stratmann’s tiger muskie, caught using a tip-up indicator rig and a five-inch shiner as bait, measured 45-3/4 inches and weighed 24.7 pounds.

It was shy of the world-record ice-fishing tip-up-caught tiger muskie by nearly three pounds, according to Syracuse.com.

But for Stratmann, of Greece, it was still the catch of a lifetime. He was fishing Jan. 24 with friend Scott Lombardi, and his tip raised, indicating a strike, about 90 minutes after he had set up his gear.

The fight lasted 25 minutes.

Stratmann weighed and measured the fish at a nearby tackle shop, then delivered the catch to a taxidermist for a trophy mount.

Syracuse.com reports that a slightly heavier tiger muskie was caught at Otisco Lake on Jan. 17.

–Image courtesy of Joshua Stratmann

Rare muskie attack leaves kayak angler with bloody foot

A Missouri angler says he was attacked by a muskie recently while reeling in a bass from his kayak.

A Missouri angler says he was attacked by a muskie recently while fighting a bass from his kayak.

Zach Reynolds, 28, told St. Louis Today that the bite from the muskie, as he dangled his feet overboard, left his foot bloodied and with a V-shaped row of punctures.

“It was so hot it was burning the tops of my feet, so I had them in the water as I was reeling in that bass,” Reynolds explained. “I was still reeling when something hit the top of my left foot. I pulled my foot up and there was blood all over it.”

Reynolds, who was prepping for last weekend’s Mo-Yak Fishing Series event on Pom de Terre Lake in southwest Missouri, said he saw the muskie dash into the murky depths and estimated the fish to measure perhaps 30 inches.

Zach Armstrong, who was fishing nearby, recalled Reynolds screaming and lifting his bloody foot out of the water.

“People spend hours and hours trying to catch one of these, and here he got bit by one,” Armstrong told St. Louis Today.

Muskies, or muskellunge, are predatory ambush specialists whose diet is mostly smaller fish, even smaller muskies. But they’ve been known to prey on ducks, frogs, and small critters that roam the water’s edge.

They’re endemic to the northeastern U.S. and throughout the Great Lakes region, and south to Georgia. They’ve been stocked in Pomme de Terre Lake since 1966.

According to the International Game Fish Assn., the all-tackle world record stands at 67 pounds, 8 ounces. That fish was caught at Wisconsin’s Lac Court Oreilles in 1949.

Craig Fuller, a Missouri Department of Conservation biologist, told St. Louis Today, “No records exist of a human being bitten by a muskie in Missouri.”

However, a Wikipedia description of the species includes this passage: “Although very rare, muskellunge attacks on humans do occur on occasion.”

–Generic muskie images are via Wikipedia

Watch: Ice fisherman pulls 50-pound fish through tiny hole

An ice fisherman fishing for pike in Minnesota got a surprise catch when he hooked a near-state-record muskie and somehow landed it.

An ice fisherman fishing for pike in Minnesota got a surprise catch when he hooked a near-state-record muskie—an estimated 50-pounder—and, amazingly, managed to pull it through a tiny hole in the ice.

While fishing on Mille Lacs Lake on Feb. 22, Jason Birke captured video of Mark Kottke—“my neighbor on the ice”—landing the 54-inch muskie, also known as a muskellunge.

“This was the biggest fish I’d ever seen caught and is only a few inches from the state record,” Birke told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors, revealing the fish’s girth as 27 inches. “Truly amazing to witness in person.”

For comparison, the Minnesota state record for a caught-and-released muskellunge is 57 1/4 inches landed at Lake Vermilion on Aug. 6, 2019 by Corey Kitzmann of Davenport, Iowa. The state record for a muskie on a certified scale is 54 pounds caught at Lake Winnibigoshish in 1957. That fish was 56 inches long.

Kottke used what is called a tip-up, an ice fishing devise that suspends a bait in the water column through a hole in the ice and detects when a fish strikes. He was using a sucker for bait and 80-pound coated tip-up line, as he stated on Facebook.

So, rather than reeling the fishing up with a rod and reel, he pulled up the fish by hand through the 10-inch-wide hole.

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“The muskie was not the intended species, as the season is closed, and [I] have never seen one [caught] through the ice,” Kottke said on Facebook.

He said the muskie was only out of the water for about a minute and half before he released it back into the lake.

“Mille Lacs is the land of giants because people continue with CPR: catch, photo, release,” he wrote.

As for Birke, he told For The Win Outdoors that he landed plenty of walleye that day, but the catch of the day belonged to Kottke.

Photos courtesy of ViralHog and Jason Birke.

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Angler lands giant muskie through narrow hole in ice

A Maine angler discovered Sunday that fighting a 27-pound muskie is not nearly as challenging as getting the fish through the ice.

A Maine fishermen discovered Saturday that fighting a 27-pound muskie is not nearly as challenging as landing such a hefty fish through an 8-inch hole in the ice.

The accompanying footage shows Wade Kelly, a participant in the Long Lake Ice Fishing Derby at Glazier Lake, plunging his entire left arm into the frigid water in an attempt to carefully lift his catch through the narrow opening.

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The muskie was so big that its head needed to be positioned perfectly to fit through the hole, and so heavy that the line might have broken had Kelly attempted to reel the fish onto the ice.

“His head was crossways to the hole [and it wouldn’t fit through],” Kelly told the Bangor Daily News. “That’s why my hand went down in the hole.”

Kelly, a guide with Tylor Kelly Camps, knew that muskies possess incredibly sharp teeth. So on his third attempt he successfully gripped the fish by its gill plate and performed a perfect extraction, to the great surprise of his wife.

Wade Kelly poses with his prize-winning muskie. Photo: Steve St. Jarre

“Oh my gosh, Wade, that is a monster!” Sue Underhill Kelly says in the footage.

She later told For the Win Outdoors: “He knew it was big but didn’t say anything to me, so I was astonished to see a muskie of that size come up in his hand.”

The 47-inch muskie weighed 26 pounds, 9 ounces, and earned Kelly first place in the muskie category of the two-day derby. Kelly’s fish beat the second-place muskie by nearly three pounds.

–Images showing Wade Kelly with his muskie are courtesy of Sue Underhill Kelly (top) and Steve St. Jarre