The Glidebaits
What I like about traveling and new species is that you have to adapt and look for the best way to get out. With muskellunge, I thought that my experience with pike would make it easy for me. Certainly, this experience helped me a lot, but I had to adapt, because finally, you don't fish a big muskie like you fish a big pike!
As explained earlier, muskies have a nasty tendency to follow lures. The "figure 8" technique is effective in triggering a following fish, but it requires the use of lures that allow the "figure 8", such as spinnerbaits. Faced with this, my strategy has been to look for lures that have the ability to get out of the way, in front of the fish, to give it the opportunity to attack. In this field, those that have my particular affection are the glidebaits. I mainly use the medium sized models rather than the big ones, because they have the advantage of casting and retrieving a little faster.
Thus, I can cover more ground, because where I fish, the areas of holding fish are not identifiable, so there can be everywhere. It is also necessary to privilege models which propose a swimming in S the most off-axis possible, to benefit the maximum of the nonlinear swimming that proposes this type of lure.
The advantages I find with Glidebaits are:
- Throbbing swim that imitates a fish at the end of its life.
- Alternating visible sides to give the fish opportunities to attack.
- Possibility to change the swimming depth (model, lead-clip).
- Possibility to change the retrieve speed and the animation of the lure (linear, twitch)
I am still at the beginning of my observations, the continuation will be to follow this year to have confirmation, or not, of this observed tendency.
Except for the Glidebaits?
Another alternative that works well is the topwater which, with its "walking the dog", also allows not to have a linear recovery. Finally, pike jerks should also be effective on this species, but as I am not personally a fan of them, I cannot test it.
For the pike lovers who would like to cross the Atlantic to fight muskies, if I have one piece of advice to give you: take some glidebaits with you!
