#0398 "Muskellunge"

This is a beautiful musky on another slab of black walnut. I put a Mepp's Muskie Killer on the upper left corner but I called it a Muskie Saver. I released every muskie that I happened to catch. One on the Rideau might have gone fifteen pounds. My Dad and I were fishing from the Joli Mon canoe.

My most memorable memory of a muskie was at Mallorytown Landing on the St Lawrence in the mid 1960's. My Brother Jim and I were casting from a wooden row boat a few hundred yards west of Chimney Island. It was a beautiful calm and sunny summer morning. I saw a long and dark shadow finning in the shadow of the boat. The water was maybe four feet deep on that grassy shoal. I watched the oar length shadow moving with the boat. Jim caught a glimpse of it and then it was gone headed in the direction we were casting toward. That glimpse of the majestic fish burnt in my brain.

Another story from my Dad tells of an earlier time on Hay Bay near Kingston. Dad was fishing with his brother Lawrence and they came across a huge dead muskie. Dad just said it was very large. It would have likely died of old age like the one found in 2017. That muskie was probably around 25 years old and was just under five feet long.

Muskies prefer clear waters where they lurk along weed edges, rock outcrops, or other structures to rest. A fish forms two distinct home ranges in summer: a shallow range and a deeper one. The shallow range is generally much smaller than the deeper range due to shallow water heating up. A muskie continually patrols the ranges in search of available food in the appropriate conditions of water temperature. Muskies are ambush predators who will swiftly bite their prey and then swallow it head first. They eat all varieties of fish present in their ecosystem (including other muskellunge), along with the occasional muskrat, rat, frog, or duck. They are capable of taking prey up to two-thirds of their body length due to their large stomachs. In the spring, they tend to prefer smaller bait since their metabolism is slower, while large bait are preferred in fall as preparation for winter. Like all creatures habitat loss is a threat to muskies.

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