Show: Late Season Northeastern Wisconsin Muskies
Destination: Northeastern Wisconsin waters
Anglers: Tom McDunnough, Shane Mason and Pete Maina
Season: Late Fall
Contact: Shane Mason, Northeastern Wisconsin Guide Service; 715-850-0573

Good friend and great muskie angler Shane Mason – offers guiding services in the Northeastern portion of Wisconsin, fishing waters, essentially from the Boulder Junction/Eagle River area – to the massive Green Bay fishery. Huge amounts of great muskie water of all shapes and sizes. Like all of the exceptional anglers I’ve fished with, Shane is very, hmmmm … lets call it “naturally methodical” in his approach to patterning what’s occurring on a given day. We were also able to hook up with long-time friend Tom McDunnough, also from that area of the state, who I’ve shared a boat with much over the years.
 

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Pattern:
We hooked up the final days of October – and while the temperatures were warming up nicely – it had been one of the coldest Octobers in recent memory. Our one concern was that possibly the warming might be a little too extreme and turn the fish off a bit. When air temps are significantly higher than water temps – and a reversal of the “normal” trend for that time of year (water cooling) it can turn the fishing off worse than a cold front. Fortunately though, while it was a definitely warming trend, it didn’t seem to shut the activity off completely.
Because the water temps had cooled to the low forties, Shane chose lakes that had a cisco forage base, as they were beginning to stage to spawn. Having three anglers and being able to use three lines per person, we had a lot of options. A big part of the plan was bringing live bait into the mix – and we ran a couple suckers on quickstrike rigs the whole time. Coupled with that, we each tried a variety of artificial presentations, from vertical jigging to soft plastics. At this time of year with the live bait out, often the artificials will lead following muskies to the live bait. We ran a live bait near the bottom and one suspended – both right over the side of the boat – the high bait intended to catch the attention of those fish that followed in.
Shane, being the naturally methodical patterner (not certain if these are all real words), carved up different sections of the lakes, working some shallow zones – to very steep edges – from the base of deep breaks to the shallow lip. My job was to fish hard and change sucker depth accordingly as we checked different levels. (For Tom – to just catch a fish.) As it turned out, the muskies were somewhat turned off, overall, from the warming trend … most of the activity in actual bites came on the live bait, and some of them very soft. On a couple strikes, I wasn’t at all certain it was even a muskie. The majority of the activity came in deeper water on the edge of spawning zones for the ciscoes, but there was some action in the shallows as well, in a few sections. And besides follows, our only actual strike in on an artificial came on a fairly shallow flat in 8 feet of water.
It was typical fall fishing, overall, fairly slow, with fairly short windows of activity, but we had great action – and dealing with a very nice average size of fish (guess mid40’s). We also had a lot of fun with some neat visual stuff: muskies following suckers for long periods of time – yet not striking … one fish, that we named Cinderella, we could see at will for over a half hour … all we had to do is lift the sucker and there she was.