Still stuck in February for one more day, it seems like maybe I’m jumping the gun thinking about fishing season. Yeah, we can fish for some bass in the bay in  a month or so, but muskie fishing at Chautauqua is a little ways off. That’s what we do all summer and have just about since we moved here in ’99, when we had the little 16′ fishing boat that originally belonged to my father-in-law. It served us well in Georgia fishing for bass, and we made it work for muskies for a few years, before we moved up to a larger Lund.

Did I ever tell you about the first time I tried to net a muskie? That was back when we still had the little boat, little enough that the chaos of catching a muskie made everything harder than it needed to be. I think we were at the north end of the lake, when Ted hooked a big one. He didn’t want to lose it and I grabbed the net, as told. If you have never seen a muskie net, it’s a gigantic net on a pole about as big as my 5’2″ height. Now, I had never netted a fish, not even a goldfish, but it hadn’t occurred to me (or Ted) how hard it would be. I tried to get it under the fish, but the weight pulled the net down and we were going to lose it for sure.

Well, not really, because did I tell you Ted didn’t want to lose it? He could see that the net wasn’t going to work, so he plunged his left hand in to grab the fish and got the lure’s hooks jammed into his arm. If you stop looking at the fish in the picture and look over at his hanging arm, you can see the lure and net hanging from his arm. Obviously, we got the desired measurement and picture, and then released the fish before we drove to the nearby hospital to have the hooks removed.

Now we have a system that always works. Whoever catches the muskie, I take the rod and bring it close to the boat, and Ted grabs it with a Boga Grip and unhooks it. Then he lifts it into the boat and either I take a pic of him if it’s his fish or he hands it to me and he takes the pic if it’s my fish. You gotta have a system.