Muskie Strategy and Tactics
Most of the topics I write about in this series of articles are based on scientific principles that apply to muskie fishing, but this article is more about taking a scientific approach to your fishing than it is about physics or biology. Specifically, it is about classifying my approach on the water and using it to develop presentations that exploit patterns in muskie behavior.
First of all, when I talk about a pattern in this article, I mean a pattern of muskie behavior; I don’t necessarily mean a fish-catching pattern complete with a suggested presentation. For most people a pattern would be “muskies are hitting black and silver bucktails retrieved over shallow weed flats.” For me, a pattern answers the question: “What are the muskies doing today, regardless of whether I am fishing for them or not?” An example might be that muskies are chasing perch schools situated over deep mud flats on the east side of open-water basins because of a sustained west wind.
Let me start out by saying that the full population of muskies in a lake are going to split themselves among many patterns. Some may be active in the weeds. Some may be dormant in deep water. Others may be suspended but inactive near pelagic forage schools. In short, there is more than one pattern of muskie behavior in play at any one time, and the sub-populations of muskies in the lake can transition between one pattern of behavior to another during the day (and also, of course, from day to day). This especially true during the transitional parts of the season like spring to summer, summer to fall, etc… Because of that, this article is timely since muskies right now are transitioning into fall patterns in the northern range and they can be scattered among many patterns of behavior.
Before I go any further, I should define the difference between strategy and tactics. In my muskie-fishing world, strategy is about ascertaining the prevalent muskie behavioral patterns and evaluating how likely they are to achieve our objective of catching muskies. Tactics are about applying specific presentations (lure, depth, and speed) given the patterns we’ve decided to attempt to exploit. Strategy is broad while tactics are more specific details. I suggest that to be a successful muskie angler, you need to be adept at both strategy and tactics. Knowing which patterns have the largest population of active muskies (good strategy) is meaningless if your presentation is flawed or weak (poor tactics). An example of this would be if you know that almost all the muskies are relatively inactive and in deep water so you decide to cast a rubber pull bait. If your rubber retrieve is too quick or sloppy so that the bait doesn’t remain close to the bottom, your knowledge of the presence of muskies will do you no good. On the other hand, if you have excellent tactics in the form of very skillful retrieves but you have no idea where the muskies are (lacking strategy), you may luck into a fish by accidentally getting close to a muskie but your chances of consistent success are very low.
Tactics are hard to discuss in an article. They are best taught in person while on the water. Besides, I won’t pretend that my tactical skill is anything beyond ordinary. There are plenty of videos online in which muskies guides demonstrate their high-quality retrieves. Similarly, there have been a lot of pixels spent on how to find patterns. This is that elusive but important technique of “reading the water” which comes from the experience of predicting how observable environmental conditions will push muskies into different patterns of behavior. Often the initial read of the water can be verified or refuted by contacts with muskies: follows, strikes, and catches. This method of finding a pattern is also not the subject of the remainder of this article. What I am more interested in discussing is how to evaluate and prioritize patterns once we’ve discovered them.
There is a significant difference of opinion, even among the top muskie anglers, about how to prioritize patterns. An example of this is the debate about whether you are more successful when you use the “run and gun” strategy or when you use the “pick it apart” strategy.
“Run and gun” prioritizes active fish. The strategy is to cover as much water as possible in hopes that you will eventually find a few active fish that will readily strike your presentation. “Run and gun” is a great strategy when a relatively high percentage of the muskies in the lake are in one or more patterns in which muskies are actively feeding. It is less successful when most of the muskies in the lake are in patterns in which muskies are dormant, but even in that case it is still viable. Sure, when most muskies are dormant you aren’t likely to catch them, but the best way to find that one active fish is to aggressively seek it by moving quickly from spot to spot.
“Pick it apart”, however, attempts to exploit the statistics of muskie activity. At any one moment in time on a lake, the vast majority of the muskies in the lake are not actively feeding. They may be catchable, but the likelihood of any one muskie striking a presentation is low. However, the fact that most of the muskies in the lake are in this state means that if you tailor your presentation to them, you could out-perform an angler that is fishing mainly for active fish.
To see how this could work out, let’s put in some hypothetical numbers. Let’s say that there are 100 muskies in a particular lake. Let’s say that under poor conditions, only 2 of those muskies are actively feeding and the other 98 are inactive. Let’s say that if you present an active presentation to an active fish, there is a 50% chance that you catch it whereas if you present an active presentation to an inactive fish there is no chance that you catch it. However, if you present a slow presentation to an active fish there is also a 50% chance that you catch it, but a slow presentation to an inactive fish gives a 5% chance to catch it. What is more there are 20 areas in the lake so each area has, on average, 5 muskies on it (yes this is a simplification, but we’ll get more realistic later!). If you “run and gun”, you can fish 10 areas. If you “pick it apart”, you can fish only 3 spots. What are the results?
For the “run and gun” angler, since you fished half the spots you will have been able to present to half the fish in the lake (50). On average, you will have found 1 of the 2 active fish and had a 50% chance of getting it to strike. So that is basically 0.5 fish caught on average. Meanwhile, you’ve also presented to half of the inactive fish (49), but you have no chance of catching any of them. The total expected catch for the “run and gun” angler is 0.5 catches.
The “pick it apart” angler presents to only 3 spots. How many active fish do they encounter? On average 0.3 active fish. They catch 50% of those they encounter so that is 0.15 fish caught. They also encounter 14.7 inactive fish. At a 5% catch rate, they catch 0.735 inactive fish on average. Their total catch would be 0.885 fish. The “pick it apart” angler is effectively presenting to a larger population of muskies.
If you change the distribution of muskie activity in the lake, however, everything changes. If there are 10 active muskies and 90 inactive muskies, let’s see what happens. The “run and gun” angler will, on average, contact 5 active muskies. With a 50% catch rate, they can expect 2.5 muskie catches. The “pick it apart” angler will encounter 1.5 active muskies, catching 0.75 on average. They encounter 13.5 inactive muskies. With a 5% catch rate on those, they catch 0.675 muskies. That’s a total of 1.425 muskies for the outing on average.
The previous two little exercises show that both strategies can be effective, but when muskies are active, a “run and gun” strategy results in more fish caught on average. Why? Because when more fish are active, fishing faster means you put your bait in front of more muskies. However, when most muskies are inactive a “pick it apart” strategy results in more fish being caught. Why? Because even though they don’t present to as many muskies, the presentation the “pick it apart” angler uses can trigger even some of the inactive muskies.
The assumption made in the previous example is that the muskies in this lake were evenly distributed among the spots that you were fishing. But a more likely scenario is that certain spots hold active fish (or a mix of active and inactive fish) and that some spots are holding either no fish or a bunch of inactive fish. This is what I meant earlier about there being multiple patterns of muskie behavior at any one time. Even muskies that are inactive are engaging in a pattern of behavior; they are at their location for a reason! For any one trip, you may not even know what spots have muskies and which don’t; you only get that information from contacting muskies by fishing. Even live sonar, for all its power, doesn’t give you one of the more key pieces of information: is that muskie you see on the screen active or inactive?
Let’s consider a situation where there are three types of areas where you’ve been fishing for muskies: weedy points, rocky reefs, and steep breaklines. You’ve had five true muskie encounters so far: one muskie struck and got off on a weedy point, four muskies followed from rocky reefs, and you’ve seen a couple of suspended muskies on steep breaklines (maybe using live sonar or side imaging) but none of them have reacted to your lures at all. Let’s say that you’ve fished two of each type of area (six areas total), so each area has been given a decent chance to show you muskies. How would you prioritize the rest of your fishing outing with this information?
For me, I would prioritize weedy points. I feel that one strike outweighs four follows. A strike indicates higher levels of activity than the more neutral response of a follow. This would be especially true if the strike occurred on a lure that indicated higher levels of activity (eg. a fast-moving bucktail). If your purpose is to get muskies into the net rather than see them slowly swimming toward the boat, look for muskies that are actively feeding rather than following. Even though there seem to be fewer muskies on the weedy point pattern, that pattern is likely to be more productive in terms of catches.
That said, I would not ignore the other areas completely. Since conditions can change throughout your outing (maybe the wind changes in speed or direction, perhaps the light intensity changes, etc…), it makes sense to occasionally check in on the other types of areas as well. Therefore, after conducting this assessment, my next six areas to fish would probably be four weedy points, one rocky reef, and one steep breakline. This allows me to focus my efforts on areas that I think are holding active fish (the weedy points) while still keeping my finger on the pulse of how muskies are using the other areas (the rocky reefs and the steep breaklines). Remember that it is extremely valuable to know what muskies AREN’T doing, so it is important to try things that haven’t been working: that’s the only way you’ll find new and emerging patterns, after all! In this example, the muskies on the reefs might be activated at sunset by a drop in light levels. You don’t want to miss out when all those fish you’ve located have decided to start feeding actively. The muskies on the breaklines may be waiting to move out into open water where large forage fish schools will feed on an insect hatch over a mud basin. When inactive muskies disappear, it often means they’ve vacated that area to become active. They probably haven’t gone far; taking some time to locate them can be very rewarding. And don’t expect that these changes in activity level will always happen because of environmental changes that you can perceive. While it may be the low light conditions that trigger muskies to feed, it could also just be that it’s been a while since they last fed (they’re are hungry!).
There are many factors to consider when fishing for muskies. In this article I tried to give you some food for thought be going beyond what lures to use and what structure to fish, offering ideas about organizing your observations of muskie activity. Hopefully those insights allow you to prioritize your fishing.
Best of luck on the water!
Dr. Bob
