Editor’s Note: This classic story first ran in the June 2010 issue of the magazine. This is the first time it has appeared online.
One. I cast a jerkbait. Nine inches long, 3 ounces, and with two 3/0 treble hooks, the lure sails 40 yards before it belly-flops on the lake surface. I point the rod at the water, reel in the slack, and let the bait sink. The lure throbs, rocks, and streaks as I work it back to the boat, pumping the rod every couple of reel cranks. When no strike comes, I fire my second cast. Two.
It’s a late afternoon in June, and I’m casting blind to muskellunge just outside Hayward, Wis.—the Muskie Capital of the World and home to the all-tackle world record. Three. I don’t know the name of the lake, and my guide, Scott Kieper, has told me not to ask. It’s a small lake—small enough for Kieper to refer to it only as the Pond. With the exception of one kid who is trolling on his own, we’re the only ones fishing. Kieper hopes to keep it that way. Four.
About an hour earlier, Kieper and his buddy Guy Mittlestadt, who helps Kieper film and produce muskie fishing DVDs, picked me up at my motel. Before I arrived in Hayward I had seen photos of Kieper on his website (scottkieper.com), but in person he looks different. He’s thinner than I’d expected, and a bit pale. He looks as though he could use a hearty meal and a long night’s sleep. He looks unhealthy—almost like a junkie. Which he is. It’s just that Kieper’s drug is muskellunge.
“Muskies cause more broken homes, divorces, and lost jobs,” says Kieper, 37. “But I got dogs. What more does a man need? And they’re German shorthairs, so they’re as smart as most people anyhow!”
Kieper feeds his muskie fix by logging long hours on the water. His season starts Memorial Day weekend and ends when the lakes freeze. For five months he hunts muskies every single day. A typical trip lasts 10 hours—longer if the bite is hot—and he and his clients often fish deep into the night, sometimes until first light. “If the fish go nocturnal, we go nocturnal,” he says. Working the graveyard shift night after night, it’s no wonder that Kieper has trouble maintaining a suntan—or a nutritious diet. “I basically live on nicotine, energy drinks, and Sour Patch Kids. I’m a bag of skin on a skeleton.”
When you fish as hard and often as Kieper, you’re bound to run into big muskies—lots of them. In 2008, Kieper and his anglers released 243 muskies. Forty-six were bigger than 45 inches, and eight broke the 50-inch benchmark. And now, in the first month of the 2009 season, he is off to one of the best starts of his career: 67 fish. He’s netted 11 muskies over 45 inches and three over 50, including a 53-inch, 40-plus-pound giant that he caught today before dawn, literally hours before he pulled into the motel lot to pick me up.
Just a few minutes into our drive to the Pond, I start to understand how Kieper is able to work such a grueling schedule: The guy has no off switch. He’s loud. He’s hyper. He’s very, very happy. One question is enough to spark a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that might jump from the predatory nature of the muskellunge to the economy to Ben Franklin. As I struggle to take notes at the rate of Kieper’s rants, a part of me begins to doubt if I can keep up with this character for two days of what I’ve been warned will be almost nonstop fishing.
“With muskies, it’s about the hunt,” Kieper says. “It’s about the chase—the fact that you’re up against the king of freshwater. And it’s about the dedication of yourself to the fish in order to succeed. You have to be willing to commit to it to attain that success.”
Later, as I stand at the bow of Kieper’s 18 1⁄2-foot Lund anchored in the Pond, I commit myself to the long hunt ahead. And I cast.
Long Day’s Journey…
I’ve never fished for muskies, let alone caught one. Before the trip I decided that I’d conduct an experiment: How many casts does it actually take to catch the fish of 10,000 casts? To help me keep count, I have a clicker inside my jacket pocket, the same kind baseball managers use to track pitch counts. The clicker goes to 9,999—not that I’ll have time for that many casts in just two days. But for as long as I am here, I will make one click for every cast.
Five. Kieper is at the stern casting, keeping one eye on the fishfinder and one on a rod rigged with a live 20-inch white sucker that he set 14 feet deep. Mittlestadt has the camera ready in case a monster strikes. Six. I’m using a 9-foot Musky Innovations rod and an Abu Garcia 7000i C3 reel spooled with 80-pound Cortland Spectron line. Seven.
At the end of each retrieve—when the ball-bearing swivel that connects the line to the wire leader is a few inches from the rod tip—I adjust my grasp on the rod and hold it like a broom, then I plunge it in the water and sweep the rod and trailing lure in a figure-eight pattern. It’s hard for me to believe that a fish so notoriously finicky as a muskie could be duped like this so close to the boat. But it happens a lot—to big fish, too. Getting a muskie to shadow the lure to the boat is one thing. Getting it to eat is another. But Kieper has a couple of tricks to make the figure eight more appetizing.
First, get the bait deep: “Most of the fish that you’re going to get at boatside are going to come out of nowhere,” he says. “If you don’t have that rod down 18 inches to 2 feet, you’re not going to have that bait deep enough to entice the fish. The muskie isn’t a surface dweller by nature, and it doesn’t want to have to come up to the gunnel.”
Second, make sure the turns in the eight are w‑i‑d‑e: “A muskie can’t turn on a dime,” Kieper continues. “The No. 1 law of predation is that you expend less energy than you consume. Otherwise you starve. So if you force a muskie to move its body harder than it wants to by making a lazy, tight turn at the end of the figure eight, the fish is going to give up on you.”
Kieper’s figure eight is aggressive and precise. It’s work. After a couple of hours, the temptation to get lazy on the occasional figure eight settles in. When that happens I remind myself that some of Kieper’s biggest muskies were caught at this point in the retrieve, including this morning’s 53-inch trophy. And even that fish needed plenty of convincing: Kieper had to make 25 consecutive figure eights before he tricked the fish.
“It’s all about the extra work you put into every single little thing on every single day with everything you do on the water,” Kieper says. “Otherwise, when that one chance on that one day comes, it’s going to be the one moment when you’re not prepared. That nanosecond can be when a 50-pound fish comes out of nowhere and blasts you.”
Seventeen…32…48…I’m in a routine now. Cast. Retrieve. Figure eight. Cast…
I fan my casts across the bow at different distances to cover as much water as possible. Fifty-nine. I work the lure back. And there’s a tug. I set the hook and the line comes tight. Kieper puts his rod down, and Mittlestadt readies the video camera. I dig the rod butt into my waist to prepare for the fight—but there isn’t any. The fish pretty much skips across the surface as I reel. And the fish isn’t a muskie. It’s a small pike. After Kieper releases it, I check the lure and cast…60.
We ease our way around the Pond, and I keep casting…88. Occasionally Kieper notices a promising spot on the fishfinder, and we stop to investigate…103. But as the afternoon fades he opts for a change of venue, a nearby spot he calls Lake Opposite…111. There he says we’ll cast a bit longer, and then troll all through the night…137. Trolling isn’t how I’d hoped to catch my first muskie. But, I’m learning, with this fish, you can’t be picky.
Kieper jumps the boat on plane, and as we race back to the access area the cold wind slaps my face. With the sun starting to set, the temperature is dropping fast. I’ve unfortunately timed my trip with the arrival of a severe cold front—nature’s way of forcing fish to go on a hunger strike. I…
