I don't know if I can say any one experience was the MOST memorable, but there is one of recent vintage that stands out in my mind. Sit back, relax, and crack a fresh Dr. Pepper. This'll take a few minutes.
This was a few summers ago -- one of my first experiences with tiger muskie. For those of you who don't know, tiger muskie is a laboratory cross between muskie and northern pike. They look like a tiger-striped muskie with a face full of glassy needle teeth and gill plates sharp enough to cut human skin. They look like some kind of pissed off alligator fish, and they grow long -- the minimum length for keepers was 42 inches! These fish are sterile, so while they will gobble up undesirable fish like carp (sorry U.K. anglers) and undersize perch, they will not overpopulate a waterway, because eventually they'll up and die (I think 7 or 8 years). But before they do that, they can get up to 5-feet long.
So, I was fishing in my boat with my 9-year-old son, my fishing buddy, and his 6-year-old granddaughter. We were fishing in a small reservoir, and we were still learning how to catch these fish. The reservoir had been an underused mud hole for years, full of carp and algae, but with the tiger muskie, the place had been revitalized -- there was underwater vegetation, bigger bass and other sunfish, and of course, the tiger muskie. This was late in the summer, our second tiger muskie excursion. The water was lower in the reservoir now, so we figured the tiger muskie had fewer places to hide. That morning my buddy and I had caught two specimens of keeper length. We put the kids in the boat to see if we could catch a few more muskie, but as the day got hotter the fishing slowed down. We were fishing up against the dam itself and we were going to go back to camp, but my son wanted to catch a few perch, which was easy to do no matter what time of day it was, so we motored up into the shallow end of the reservoir.
My son and the little girl started fishing for perch. My son had an UglyStik ultra-light combo and the girl had a purple kid's combo (Barbie, I think). My buddy and I kept using our muskie outfits in case there were any muskie hunting perch up in the narrows. I was rigging up a lure that my buddy's friend had tied when my son started pulling on his rod and complaining of a snag. Kids are always snagging up. So I told him to hand me the pole so I could see if it was one of those "hard" snags like a log, or if it was just some weeds that we could pull up.
It felt like a snag to me, too -- for about 5 seconds. Then I noticed that the line was moving. Not too much, but it was moving. My buddy and I both realized what was happening and we both said, "Oh no." Except I don't think we said "no." It might have been language slightly more coarse than that.
The decision was made to let my son fight the fish. Again, this was an ultra-light outfit with 6-pound factory test which was tied to a swivel which was clipped onto a 1/8th-ounce lead-head jig. It was really just a matter of time WHEN (not if) the muskie would part-off -- broken line, broken swivel, opened up hook. But we told my son to pull up and crank down, pull up and crank down. He has been deep-sea fishing, so he knows the basics. He gave that rod a good tug and a quick reel in, and brought the fish up about 4 feet. That's when the muskie decided he had had enough. The line angled toward and then under the boat, but the reel didn't give line -- the drag was screwed all the way down. The rod tip immediately pointed at the water and it was getting ready to double back on itself like a cursive "L" as the fish swam away from us and to our rear. My son had the presence of mind to put half the rod in the water to follow the line, and my buddy and I scrambled to loosen the drag, got in each other's way, said a few more coarse words that the boy's mother would not approve of, and finally got the drag loosened up. We worked the line around to the other side of the boat and the fish took some line. Of course, by "some" I mean "all of the." This was a kid's outfit, so half the line it came with had been hacked away because of various tangles and snags. I could see the arbor through the last few strands of line, but we didn't get to the point where we had to see if the arbor knot would hold. Little by little, over about 15 minutes, he got the fish turned back around. It ran and he pulled it back a few more times, but soon it was up under the boat again -- we hadn't seen it yet, but we could tell from the line on the reel that it was on only 12 feet or so of line.
My son decided he wanted to net the fish, so he handed the rod to me and he picked up the net. We'd set the drag by feel, so it was engaging a lot, just the act of pulling on the fish while it was stationary would sometimes make it buzz.
Sorry guys -- I guess this was too long to get the whole thing in... e-mail me for the rest?
