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YouTube different from the normal me Eater YouTube channel. You need to take action here. Go to the meat Eater pod cast Network on YouTube and subscribe. Keep your subscription to the other thing and you'll be subscribed to both and you'll get all of our podcast videos there. Going forward, they will not be where they used to live. Go to the new place. Thank you. Like turn a machine on, Phil, We're on, We'll start the show. Yeah, I was all fired up, Yoanni just put one of those little magnifying
lenses in his in his thing. Yeah, because you lose because your pins get blurry.
Oh my gosh, having two pins, well I still have two pins about seeing four.
Yeah, you're gonna want to take it right back out. Here's what you're gonna want to do. I went down that whole path.
Okay, and this is in the peep site.
Yeah. So when you're when you start getting old man vision, okay, and you need reading glasses, your pin when you're shooting archer, your pin and gets blurry and so you know it starts to affect your accuracy. So then you get go down and get one of them little what they called.
Yeah, it's a claire no, yeah, go clarify whatever helps.
Yeah, and you put it in and you can get different magnifications, right, and you look and you're like, it's like the heavens have opened and there's your pin and all that's glory.
And this is my experience to a t.
Okay, and you think this is the greatest thing in the world. I'm gonna start just you know, Robin Hood and all my arrows. Then it's gonna happen. You're gonna wind up in Hawaii, right, it's gonna be getting dark. Okay. You're looking in that thick vegetation, and here comes a black hog.
I think I was there for this.
You're gonna pull back and you're not, and you're not even gonna be able to see the hog. The hog will cease to exist, and you'd be like, what happened? And you let down and you look in areas and then you draw back. How does he keep doing that? And you let don look, he's still there and you draw back. That's what's gonna happen to you, my friend. Joy Today by Muskie Fisherman Guide author someone who's devoted his life to muskie history, Larry Ramsell Ramsell, Ramsell, What
do you like? Larry Ramsel Ramsell fresh out of Wisconsin. We recently we had a number of episodes recently where we brought up controversies surrounding the muscle Lunge. How do you like to say it?
That's proper Okay, we call him Muskies, of course, but proper name is muscle.
N A lot of controversies around Muskies. Oh boy, people being like I caught the real world record, but they won't accept it. And we kept saying, and I said, I'm gonna get a we should find a certified real musky expert. A number of people wrote in saying, if you're going to talk to the real musky expert, the man at the end of the line.
Let's hope that's a turner phrase.
It'd be lair I just made that up. It's good. It'd be Larry Ramsell right that down.
I may. I may not know what questions you're going to ask, but I'll know the answer to at least ninety five percent of them.
Here's one, I bet you know the answer to this. How'd you wind up getting into muskies? How'd you get like? How'd you become a muskie fanatic? You know? And are you part of the muskie community?
Yes, I am. I'm lean it up to my ears. My dad started with the neighbor, caught a nice fish and then opened the door.
And where we went at what age?
Well, I was probably seven or eight when he started catching him, but I caught my first legal one when I was thirteen and been at it for three years.
Wow. You guys probably ate them back then, huh?
I ate every one of them.
Can I tell you like an apocryphal family story and you can tell me if you've ever heard of this? Okay, perhaps apocryphal family story. My maternal grandfather was a musky fishermen.
I heard that on your podcast.
Yeah, he likes to talk about They would harness rigged chipmunk yep and put it on a board out in the pond, and then you paddle the shore and pull the chipmunk off the board with your ride and then let it swim around out there. Is that a true musky fishing technique of days gone by?
Possibly? Okay, But you can substitute squirrels, cats, cats, anything.
So you've heard these stories?
Oh?
Yes, have you witnessed some of these stories?
No? Not that one?
Okay, So I can't tell Like, okay, I'm gonna keep telling that story. Where'd you grow up?
I grew up in Illinois and we faced always in Wisconsin, Hayward area, okay, started when knee high grasshopper and still at it. Live three miles outside of town and go to Canada to catch muskies.
You don't fish Wisconsin much, not much.
I faced one half a day last week, but I faced three weeks here in Canada. That's where the big ones are.
Got it? If you had to define the musky community, what would you say? It is? Like? Why is the muskie community different than other fishing communities.
Well, they're a very dedicated lot and they're all very conservation oriented, wanting to preserve the species. Got it the way the sport has increased in the last fifty years. Had there not been catch and release come into vogue, there wouldn't be any left, do you think so? Absolutely, guarantee they had to fry them all. They would have
fried them all, you think. So. It takes some five to six years before they spawn, and they're not very productive at that raid, and then they'll live to twenty to thirty years old, and it takes a long plime to for them to get there, and they're too valuable to catch just once. There's legions of stories of the same fish being called multiple times due to catch and release, which takes the pressure off the fishery and shows that catch and release does work if they're properly handled.
Well, was the last time you ate one?
Oh, it's been quite a while. I can't even remember the taste, but I will tell you they were good.
Yeah.
What was the favorite preparation back then?
My dad liked to skin them and then have Mom bake them in a whole piece In fact, I had my wife do on one time I left the head on that she put an apple in the mouth the whole seriously. Yeah, yeah, I've got a picture. It's pretty cool looking.
How well he been married?
Which time?
Oh, the first time?
The first time was ten years, the second time was seventeen, the third time was I don't know three or four?
What do you think those were all too much fishing?
Probably just give it a cumulative number then just say forty one.
I've been living with the gal I live with now for fifteen years, but we're not married, So that whole scene's working out better than.
Has fishing torn you apart in your relationships.
I think there was a lot more to it than just fishing. Yeah, I probably spent money. I didn't have to spend chasing fish, but yeah, I got you shut out. I should say, musky is the only thing I fished for?
Well, at what point were you just all muskies all the time?
Right off the bat?
Is that right?
Yeah? I mean when I was a kid and try to catch a walleye off the dock, you know, for something to do, but when it was time to get in the boat, it was musky road only.
Yeah, how many states.
You fish muskies in twenty two states and two provinces of Canada.
Okay, how many states are they from?
Right now? There's thirty eight states that have muskies or tiger muskies. No, no, no, no, I mean.
Where is the fish native to and where all has it been spread to.
The upper Midwest Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, the Ohio River system through down into Kentucky. There's muskies in Tennessee. They did at one time range as far as northern Alabama native, but they're not there anymore, Okay. And then you know, people started catching them and there's such pressure got on the fisheries that the dn R for inst in Wisconsin had to build two of the world's finest musky hatchers just to keep up with the
harvest of one hundred thousand muskies a year. And they just couldn't keep up with it. So that's why catch and release and you called it two point oh, it's been two point oh since the late seventies'.
Oh that's when the musky that's when catch and release took hold so way before other fisheries.
Yeah, and what happened early on I analyzed it in reverse. They did it wrong. As people got into catch and release, they let the little ones go and kept the big ones. Well, it should be just the opposite. And that's why now the trophy waters. Like, for instance, in Ontario, when I first started fishing there, the size it was twenty eight inches a day, two fish per day.
Where was that again?
In what in Ontario?
Okay MEI limit again?
Pardon me? In Ontario it was twenty eight inches to a day.
Okay, minimum size twenty eight inches, right, I got you.
Then after some studies were done and they found out that there was two different strains of fish, and we'll get into that probably a little bit too. But uh, there are lakes that grow big fish and lakes that never grow big fish. So Ontario picked out their trophy lakes, the ones that had the potential to grow big fish, and put a fifty four inch size limit on them. Quite a change from the hell a jump, yeah, quite a change from twenty I.
Remember everybody's worked up when when I was a kid and they moved northern from twenty one to twenty four, you just thought they'd you.
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's you know, my dad never released the musky's life. In fact, he netted one ones that I released. It's because he wanted it back in the boat. He wanted to eat it. That was just I mean, that's that was the mode that he grew up fish and muskies in. And uh huh, I couldn't convince him to catch and release was a good idea.
So what's the difference between like a big fish lake and a small fish lake? Is it forage or uh?
That's part of it, But the biggest thing is genetics.
Okay, and yeah, you think so.
Absolutely, But let me also clarify that I don't know if I buy that, Larry, there are two different fish. Okay, Doctor Lebaux tries to say there's two different species. The most the fishery world isn't buying that, but yet they kind of buy it when they went to a fifty four in size limit for the trophy lakes. Well, the lakes here's here's how it works. The lakes that's always had muskies but never had pike are called alapatrick. Those populations spawn once and have no competition from pikes, so
they don't grow. Big waters like the Saint Lawrence River and the Georgian Bay and you know Lake here On like Saint Clair, those waters have always had pike in them. That's called sympatrick. So those fish have the potential to grow big, and they've evolved a different strategy for spawning. They spawn in deeper water then the muskies. In the muskies only lakes and they spawn twice. That's because they broadcast their eggs. They don't guard them. They don't like
a northern pike. When they spawn, their eggs will stick to weeds, keep them out of the muck in the bottom of the lake. The muskies they just dump their spawning then where it goes, that's where it goes. So that's why their reproductive percentage is very, very small, and that's why the stocking where there's any kind of pressure at all is necessary to keep the fishers going, even if it's a native like let alone, one that started
out of being a stock lake. So it's just a matter of the fish that evolved with pike evolved to do things different and grow bigger. For instance, most of the early studies that are done on eggs in muskies were anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred and
fifty thousand with a big mature female. Big using the term loosely, But what we found was that the bigger fish in the simpatric waters like Eagle Lake or Georgian Bay or sing Launch River, they spawn twice, and they can have up to eight hundred and fifty thousand eggs, and they have to spawn twice because they can only mature fifty percent of the eggs in the first go around. And then then they dumped that, and then a week to ten days two weeks later, the rest of the
eggs mature and they spawn a second time. And the second spawn is equally as important as the first spawn.
Now, this is sorry to interrupt it. Twice annually or twice in a lifetime, twice in the spring, okay, so twice every spring, okay now, And they spawned till they get right up to the end when they went. You know, if they're thirty years old, they're still spawning a lot of people think that as they get old, their eggs aren't. You know, they don't spawn anymore. The eggs are any good, they're not viable. But that's not true. They do very well right up till they die.
So what I want to get into the whole record book question. But I want to lay out a little more biology for biology for people. First, how could someone when you said that, someone argues it's two species, I mean, how could that possibly be true?
Well, they're sion, I mean, but they're not.
Like are they saying they're genetically separate and wouldn't be able to reproduce.
Well, here's the thing. Back in the mid nineteen hundreds, biologists tentatively agree or agree to agree that there were three subspecies of muskies. There was one musky, but three subspecies yep. So they went with that for a long time. And then when it was discovered that we had alipatric fish and sympatric populations that were totally different and grew
differently and spawned different then they change their thinking. When doctor LeBeau did his doctoral thesis which I worked with for the whole summer of nineteen eighty six on Eagle Lake and Wabblagoon Lake in northwestern Ontario, his hypothesis was that there are two distinct species of muskies, one being the smaller strain or the smaller population the olive patrick fish, and the big ones being the sympatric populations. The big water fish.
Yep. So when you're when guys are when moskie guys are saying that some lake has some strain, what are they talking about? The probably the strain.
But are the fisheries producing these world class hatcheries that you're talking about, Rather, are they producing a particular strain of muskie.
They have just graduated to that now they're they're They're big thing today is genetic preservation. This lake is genetically different than this lake, then you don't mix them up. For over one hundred years, Wisconsin raised fishing in their hatcheries,
stocked them wherever. In fact, in the early days they put them on a train then every whistle stop if you wanted some muskies for your lake, and meet them with your horse and buggy, load them on your wagon, and away you go, and nobody knows where they went. So that's why there's no way today that they can define which lakes were native musky lakes except the ones that are connected to the river systems.
Gotcha, So they kind of lost track of the fish for a while.
Well, they didn't even try to keep track. It was nineteen thirty three before the wisconsinina Or even started keeping stocking records, So everything that happened from nineteen hundred to nineteen thirty three nobody knows. Of course, everybody's long gone now, so there's no records anywhere what was done. And they did that up until two thousand and six. We started a battle with the DNR about we wanted a bigger strain of fish. We wanted the Mississippi River strain, which
grow big, and they grow big fast. For instance, they have been documented to grow up to fifty four inches and thirty eight pounds in ten years. The Mississippi fish, the Mississippi River strain, and these came out of Leech Lake in Minnesota, which is connected to the Mississippi River. So that's you know.
When you say we wisconsinights.
Yeah, we were trying to get the DNR to quit getting muskies from wherever the hell they wanted to get them and mix them all up and stock them because they didn't grow and we proved that when we started the fight. They hired a geneticist from the University of Wisconsin. And what they had done is over fifty years they had created a lake it's called Bone Lake in western Wisconsin.
It was not a native musky lake. So for fifty years they mixed whatever in there, and when we made an issue of it, the geneticists said that they probably have done is created a Hatchy strain of fish. In other words, they'd take the eggs from there, raise them in a hatter, and put them back in there, plus stock from wherever they were getting their eggs from. And he proved that that's exactly what they did, so he shut them off from ever using that lake again. For
Riggs got it. So if you go to the Spooner Hatchy Spooner, Wisconsin, they've got an area where you walk into and you look down into the hattery floor and around the windows. They've got pictures. In one of the pictures they show them taking eggs from a twenty eight incher. The genetics has said that's fine because you need to have diversity. But what you don't know, particularly when you've been mixing stocks for over one hundred years, is where
they came from. What are the genetics? Do they have the capability to grow big? Which they didn't, And so that's why we were wanting to change. Because the anglers want fish to grow fast and grow big, and because they grow fast they're very aggressive and they hit lures a lot easier than fish that are, you know, fifteen twenty years old, and they're this big.
But are you guys Are these guys chasing? Are they just chasing because they want big fish? Or are they chasing some thing? Like when you go back in the historic record, you go back to the late eighteen hundreds, you go back to the early nineteen hundreds, is there something to suggest that back then there was a bunch of giant muskies running around.
No, but every time a giant musky was caught, it made big news, okay, And so that's that's what musky fishermen fed on. And there's you know, there's different stages. The newcomers they're happy to catch a thirty incher just to say they caught a musky. But as you progress in the sport, as you learn more, you learn how to fish better. You go to lakes that have bigger fish naturally, always wanting to catch more and more.
And more bigger, bigger, big.
And that's what I'm struggling.
To phrase a question I'm trying to ask you, be Uh, is it musky conservation or is it just wanting big muskies, and no matter how you get them.
It's combination.
Okay.
But here's the thing. There are some lakes that will never produce a fish over thirty five pounds. More than likely it's an alapatrick lake, although I've got an example
of the sympatric lake that's in that position. But so, for instance, I used to tell people in my seminars, if you're lake record where you're fishing is thirty five pounds, guess what, You're never going to catch a world record there because it doesn't exist that strain of fish, that genetic pool doesn't have the potential to get big.
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of what's Kaufman's first name, Carl Kevin montif and oh Matt Coffin, Well they do. They work on mule deer, they work on ungulates. No, I'm not from well, I don't know that this is applicable. But they've gone in a totally different thing, not even apples and oranges. It's farther apart than apples and oranges, maybe maybe far apart. Musquie's and mule deer m words. So they share ms. But here's
the thing. They go into all these areas, like in their research, they go into these areas where it's like, oh, it's genetics, genetics, genetics. Okay, these deer don't have the right genetics. They're never going to grow big, they don't have the right genetics. You can take those deer and the areas that have the no good genetics and you move them to a new place. Guess what one genetics.
It was?
Uh, well yeah, but not just food for you. It was food for your mother. Meaning when a when a when a deer hits the ground, his his fate is sealed when he hits the ground, Like you could tell a lot about his potential antler growth already because it was like what was his in uterow nutrition? Like right,
But I'm not getting into that with fish. I'm just saying like all this this, and I don't know if this is even applicable in fish, but all this idea of like certain areas and certain counties having genetics is is uh, it could be such a much more complex picture.
Oh absolutely absolutely that it's.
That it's all these all these hidden factors and that you could take those fish and move them to the lake that has good genetics and somehow monitor them and make it that they can't intermingle, and all of a sudden you might realize that it wasn't genetics, it was whatever the hell.
Especially one example of the sympatrick population that I have on mind, I've got some friends that fish there religiously, and they're very good fishermen, and they've caught over a nine hundred fish, but they've never caught a fifty incher, even though over there the population of fish that you would think has the potential grow big. But they're in a lake with pike. But there's so few spawning areas for the pike that the musks can control them quite easily.
And so it's a what we call a trout lake. It's a deep clear and they feed mostly on trout and probably small pike. But they just haven't evolved a need to get any bigger because the pike don't get big. I mean, they catch a nice one veran's while, but most of them are you know, hammer handles. So that's a sympatric situation that if they were put someplace else, like a bigger water, if they were moved to the Saint Lawrence River or Georgian Bay, they probably would continue
to get bigger. They would have that potential, but because of the situation of where they're at, the forage, the cold water, the not having the need to get bigger. Yeah, they just have stopped at about almost fifty in there.
They're keeping in line with their surroundings and ecosystem needs versus being in a bigger ecosystem. They could grow all they want and never outpace that ecosystem.
Right right, So.
Your girlfriend now, is she like to fish moskies?
No bluegills with a barber worms?
I'll go with her, Man steer your girlfriend, Larry? Where right now are the real big ones?
Like?
Who's going to catch the next record? Or is it too late? They'll never catch a new record?
Well, lack Sul has the potential. What's that since that's what started this whole thing, me getting me involved Here at Laxul is where that's seventy to suppose it's seventy two pounder came from seventy two to two is what they call it officially. But that lake and you probably didn't know this is catch an immediate release only. Can't keep anything there?
Okay, what tells where this lake is?
It's in northwestern Ontario, Okay, or northern Ontario. It's it's getting towards the northern part of the Musky Range.
And is it is it a Is it a big river chain, big reservoir, Oh, big reserv damned damned river system. Yep.
And it's got some studs in it, It's got somes, got some big face. Now, there's never been weighed that I'm aware of of any over sixty pounds, but there's been a lot of sixty inch class fish, long, long face. In fact, I guided a friend of mine's son to a fifty seven incher there. So they get they get long, they just don't get seventy pounds.
Sorry, yeah, uh, what do you think is the max they can get? Like I'm talking like gill Netted found dead on the beach whatever.
All right, there's never been one hung on a scale that weighed more than the world records, the former world records. But I'm of the belief ninety five percent that most of them are bogus. Can I read this to you? This? This kind of covers a ton of stuff. This is written by Gord Pygor, who used to be the fisher's managers for the Lake of the Woods Area, Kenora, Ontario.
And he's on my Modern Day Muskie World Record Committee, and he talks about in here doctor John Castleman, who your friend Patrick Dirkin wrote about in the thing he did. And doctor Casman is also on my committee, and he's acknowledged as the foremost musky scientist on the planet. Got it, Okay, if we could reduce the handling mortality of big muskies by only four percent, we would increase the musky population by a stagging, earring seventy percent. Think about think about that,
I am. He'll explain a little more.
Oh he better.
Crossman and Castleman, Crossman was Castleman's teacher, were also able to show that the benefits of returning large muskies unharmed to the water resulted in an increase in the mean length of the fish, which was precisely the news that muskie anglers wanted to hear. But the Klethrum study, that's this bone here. This is what they use now to age how old a musky is. Yep, they used to use scales, but after age ten the edges were off and they weren't accurate.
Got it.
So that's why they went to this The calculated mortality rates musculine's mortality rates and compared them to the muscular mascimum age to see if the age of the trophy fish had changed over time, and they found that the maximum age of muskies may be in decreasing. In fact, they believe that the maximum may age of the fish may have decreased by two years from twenty three to twenty one years of age during the study period. Now, the difference of a couple of years may not sound significant,
but remember that the fish spawn throughout their lives. The biggest musky lay of the lay more eggs in the smaller fish, and that the mammoth muscle engineerly always result from the very largest year classes. When we viewed in this context, Caslin Crossman concluded that we would need a seventy percent increase in annual recruitment to ensure the same number of free fish reached their maximum age and thus maximum trophy size. Follow that. M Okay, now, let me
read your mind. I'll bet you're wondering if ninety nine percent of the muskies are being released, which is about what it runs you read my mind, at least ninety five percent. Yeah, how could the age of the oldest trophy sized fish be decreasing. Good question, right, Two likely reasons. The ranks of the musky fraternity are swelling at the same time that our knowledge base is better than ever before. There are quite simply more of us musky anglers. We're
better skilled, better equipped, and we're catching more fish. And while we're putting them back. Catch and release only works if the fish survive, which means proper handling, and that's the big thing today. Or to put it, put it the way my good friend and legendary musky angler Dick Pearson excuse me, puts it like this. Take a look at any social media site these days, and you know that the the what he means. Got to give Dick
credit to for walking the walk talk. He wrote The Amazing Muskies on the Shield, one of the most comprehensive how to books on musky fishing. But if you recall the front cover, it doesn't feature an angler holding am musky, as you would suspect, but rather a beautiful eke of the woods sunset. I know because I took the photo
and gave it to Dick. He has caught more big muskies than almost any angler on the planet, and yet almost every time I call him for a photo to illustrate a feature on which I am working, and have interviewed him, he tells me he doesn't have any Gord writes for infishermen and he's on the Unfisherman TV show.
Yep.
He keeps his fish in the water at all times and handles them exactly like what they are, the proverbial geese that lay the golden eggs. And if we all did the same thing this fall for the rest or for the rest of our musky fishing careers, and in the process reduced the handling mortality of the oldest and biggest fish by just four percent, we would initiate the same effect as if we had increased the annual recruitment of muskies by a staggering seventy percent. In other words,
the recruitment is poor. Yep. And if there's nothing he left to say, spawn is really poor. Let's give Castlemen and Crossman the last word on the subject. The largest trophy musculine in the population are usually the oldest individuals. The largest year classes produce the greatest number of old individuals. Hence, extremely large year classes are required to produce the largest
oldest trophy musculench. If catch and release methods can be improved to reduce mortality, they would have the same effect as increasing recruitment and would help maintain year class strength, longevity, size, and number of trophy fish in the population. We don't need any more information, studies, nothing, It's already figured out by folks who've done the legwork. CPR is all fine and dandy, but more fish caught equals more dead fish, especially in the open deep water scenarios and with more
ill equipped anglers. Just out for the ego shots.
So what are ego shots?
Ego holding the fish picture?
Yeah, just for the no, real good not to hurt those fish.
Pardon me?
You know I got a real good way not to hurt the fish.
How's that?
Don't catch it, don't cat That's true.
That's the best way, which I've done a lot of. But then, yeah.
So do you think do you think that you're at how much has your fishing effectiveness changed over the years.
I can't even calculate it. When I first started fishing, it's a long time ago. Boys, sixty eight years how old are you right now? We had a wooden rowboat, no depth finder, no electric motor, no big motor to run around like a crazy man they do today and cast to the shoreline. That's how That's how we caught our fish. That's what we knew. We were fishing Floyd's, which made shoreline fishing a little more productive. Open the big, open clearwater lakes. You found the shoreline, you catch three
hundred northerns in a week. You won't catch a muskies. Been there, done that too.
Explain all that again. Now you grew up casting the shoreline, right, and why would that not be effective? Now?
Well, what's it's still effective on Floyd's type reservoirs where there's a lot of wood and hiding places.
What's the word you use?
The flowage?
Floydge okay, like the river's dammed up and they call them Floyd's in Wisconsin. Reservoirs are the more.
Commons is nodding knowingly over here because he uses the term flowids.
That's what that means. That's his favorite lakes to Floyd is.
Yeah, we were just talking about one of them Floyidges.
So it's a reservoir, right, there's a flowage, same difference, gotcha.
So reasonally called them floyd just because, as you know, starting the eighteen hundreds eighteen eighties, they started logging the whole state of Wisconsin, yep, and what was left was a mess. And a lot of that debris is in the in the watersheds. And when they put a dam in and made a floyage, that's what it looked like, flowed full of stuff. So oh okay, that's why they.
Call him that debrisot right. Gotcha.
In fact, where it was almost impossible to run over a motorboat wide open up a fairly new floidge, you're just risking death.
I see. So back now that I understand that casting the shoreline when you were young, right, that's just how you went out and fished. You went out and went along. I know the strategy you're talking about, right, go on the edge, cast up towards the shore line again again again.
Again, and you know, if you could find an offshore structure and the way we did it in those days with a rock and a piece of rope, no depth finders again, then you had a secret honey hole. Then as depth finders came on the scene, he was able to read the lake bottom without dropping your rope and your rock down. And so all of that increases your knowledge.
Did you guys used to use the rock and rope strategy.
Started early on? Yeah, or in the Floyd's that I was fishing. It was fairly shallow, so you could hit the bottom of the ore in most places and feel around down there, right. But then in the river channels you couldn't touch anything.
Yep.
But the maximum depth is like fifteen feet except for a hole by the dam that's thirty three feet deep. But the average depth of the whole lake is seven feet okay, so you know, then from that you graduated the bigger waters. We went to Canada to catch big muskies. We used our lake. The first trip up there, we used our lake shore casting and we caught three hundred
northerns and no muskies. So we learned and get the hell away from shore and get out on the rock reefs and the deep weed beds and so forth.
Got it.
And that's the way all musky fishermen progressed. They learn a little bit of time. If the ones that are have a little money and are smart to hire a guide and cut their learning curve in half, and then you know, has more more new equipment comes out. The big thing now is forward facing sone arts. It's going to kill the musky populations if it's not controlled. It's just it's too easy to sharpshoot them.
And it becomes explain that.
I've got a friend that kind of helped pioneer it in Minnesota, run his boat sixty miles a day and make thirty five casts, and every cast was at a fish that you could see on the screen.
Yep. And you're talking about like live scope.
Yeah, live scope for forward facing snarts a difference.
So do you have one of those setups?
I do not, And I here's the thing. I'm madey two years old. I've got two bad shoulders that one needs replaced because of casting, because of casting. So you would think something like that would intrigue me very much. I don't want anything to do with it because it's not musky fishing.
Well, let me do a little devil's advocating.
Okay, I love it though, Okay, go ahead, thank you, you're welcome.
Let me do a little devil's advocating. Don't you do you feel that.
On behalf of those who don't like hard work.
No, I don't.
I don't have one of these contraptions. Now, if you look down across from you, and down that way you can see some real advocates.
They're really outing them.
Yea, you see some real cheating.
We don't use musky fishing.
They're used properly. I don't have a problem with it.
Well, I'm more asking you to philosophize about the flow of technology. Don't you feel that you could have said the same thing about anything, monofilament?
I mean like your death finder and your your You're I'm still using a rope in a rock, by god?
Yeah, so how are you? Don't you feel? And I'm not trying to take you to task. I'm just like asking you to think about it, because you obviously thought about this a great deal. Uh, you and your life, as you laid it out, you have welcomed with open arms all form of technological innovation to a point. Okay, why is this the one that's going to break something?
Here's here's what's gonna happen. It's gonna if if too many new people get into the game and they're not ethical, and they run around the lake and spotfish and cast him and catch him. There's one bass guy that did a film. He caught three over fifty inches and a half a day because he was using electronics.
Right, He's like, I see what the big deal is?
Right, So, but he had no concern in fact that you know what he was actually doing.
But he wasn't throwing him out a stringer.
And the thing of it is, we don't know if he knew how to handle him. He's a bash fishermen. They hold him by the lip. Right, try holding the musky by the lip. You have a sore thumb, and see what happens You get to the throwing up through your thumb. So it's making experts out of rookies, Yeah, almost instantly, And that's wrong.
They say the same thing about turkey decoys.
The.
Motion decoys, same thing.
But you know the the that's a hot topic, isn't it.
The Yeah, the thing of it is is that, yes, you can control to an extent with size limits and bag limits. But since the muskie world is already ninety nine percent catch and release anyway, all we're doing is going to handle a hell of a lot more fish with a lot of new people that don't know how to handle them, which, as I just read, their mortality
is the ultimate goal to eliminate it. So how do you educate one hundred thousand new musky fishermen to handle of fifty inch or properly in the first place is first time it flaps its jaws that we're going to drop it in the bottom of the boat and it's going to flop around and tip tackle box over and whatever fish.
Is the proper way to handle a muskie?
Well, the best way is like was mentioned here about dick Pearsons, leave them in the water boat side. There's floating rulers that you can get to lay alongside and see how long they are. Nobody agrees with weighing them. If they're not a record class fish or your person seems like.
The last one, you'd wind away because those are the big ones of the big breeding females right right.
It's like in Florida where you cannot get a grip and green with the tarpin cannot unless you buy a tag and you want to kill it.
Then it's legal. Groups you can, Oh, it's against the law to take a grip with a tarpin. Yeah, so getting in the water with them and taking pictures.
But you gotta you have to have the intent. You have to purchase the tag and have the intent to weigh it for a record, and then everybody's okay. So that's tarpin conservation.
Which means it's almost a totally limiting handling mortality.
Unless I want to just buy a tag and bank of fish, right.
And how money they're gonna kill doing that? Not that many?
Well do you do? You routinely see uh, poor handling methods among newer muskie fishermen, and then good handling methods among older muskie fishermen.
Some older musky fishermen that don't catch a lot of muskies do not handle them either.
They don't get the practice.
I mean there are there are not an easy fish to handle. Yeah, particularly when you're talking to thirty five thirty forty forty five fifty pounds. That was a forty forty pounder right there.
That's a forty that I'm gonna just hold this up. Some people can see that you're gonna shred your thumb.
Yeah. Now, what you have to consider there is is even though they're sharp and long, there's a lot of meat on the on the base of the teeth. So you're not going to see that much when you see the fish, but maybe that much. Yeah, you'll see and that'll go through your finger. In fact, a friend of mine running fifty six inches tooths all the way through his thumb out through the thumbnail. These teeth are razor sharp on one side and they're dull on the other side,
and that's for a purpose. That's when they grab a bait fish. The sharp helps penetrate quickly, but the round sides keep it from ripping and making the holes bigger and bigger, and the forage can get away.
When we were in high school, we were having bbygun wars, and this dude named Tristan out the slabs at Cedar Creek, he caught a baby that went through his finger and out the fingernail. That's excruciating pain.
I can imagine.
Back to like though, if you are Larry gonna catch a musky and you do want to get a picture with it, you gotta make sure you keep it in the net, like with the face up. A lot of the times muskies will get in the net and thrash too, so those hooks will get caught on the higher side of the net and kind of hang the fish up higher seat. That's a very common thing. You gotta make sure you get that hook off keep the fish's head in the water.
Right. A lot of the musk nets, if today, have a real deep bag and like a ranger boat's fairly high shot but not ridiculous. But these deep bag nets can keep the fish down in the water with the with the rim of the net on the gun of the boat.
You guys using barbleous No.
But there's a lot of guys that are saying that's what should be used.
Do you use live bait there's I used.
To, I don't, I don't anymore. But if you use what we call quickset rigs, I have no problem with it. But problem so far I've seen is some of the guides are not using quickset rigs to set quick There's a destroying the whole thought process of what do you want the musk You do is grab your sucker. There's two trouble hooks on the sucker, and you said immediately and you should hook the fish just like if they grab one of these lures there, yep.
Whereas the harness rig they kind of have a little thing that or a hook that you can put through the nose of the sucker.
Goes through the nostrils to hold it on the on the rig.
Yep.
But I gf a forens. If you use a sucker for muskies, you won't accept it though. Yeah, if just the legal method in Wisconsin, which it is in all of Wisconsin, IGFA wouldn't accept it if you called a seventy five pounder. That's just their rules.
They don't want people to use live bait.
They don't want light bait.
Here's a question about the IGFA. Uh, you're familiar with the Boone and Crocket Club. Yes, okay, Boone and Crockett Club has different categories, so as you'll find. Oftentimes the biggest specimen known to man was not killed by a hunter. Okay, the biggest big horn, right, the world record, the biggest big horn ever recorded was found dead. The biggest black bear found dead. I think the biggest white tail found dead. Right. It's just kind of weird that it always winds up
being that the really big ones are found dead. Is the IGFA interested in and how big do they get? Are they only looking at fish that conformed to their own little.
Rous pretty much? It IJFA started in nineteen thirty nine. It was pretty much a rich man's game at that point. Big offshore yachts and you know money people.
Yeah, yeah, like Billfish and all that got.
It right, and they were totally salt water until nineteen seventy nine. I started the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame World record program in the early seventies, and Field and Stream at that time was the other record keeper in fresh water, and they got upset with us, and they tried to get us to cease and desist and whatever, claiming that those records were theirs. And our attorney told them to go fly a kite. Those records belonged to the people who caught the fish, and they're in the
public domain. We can use them if we want to, and we did, and then they backed off, So they eventually turned their freshwater program were to IGFA. Until that time, IJFA had no use for fresh water whatsoever. So somewhere along the late seventies we decided to try to merge the two programs IJFA in the Hall of Fame. So I flew to Fort Lauderdale, where they were headquartered at the time, and we had a meeting with Elwood Ka Harry, who was the president at the time, and they.
Got that big it's a big marlin out front, right, Yeah, a big silver.
I don't remember if they did it in the Fort Lauderdale. They probably did Fort Daney a beach where they're at now, Rondini Beach. But anyway, it was going to work out where there'd just be one record keeping program. Well, the one stipulation that the Hall of Fame wanted is they wanted the IGFA to allow them to print the records in their publications, and IJFA wouldn't allow it until after they'd published it. Well, that didn't set well with the
founder and the director of the Hall of Fame. So he he was smart when he turned over the record He made copies of everything. So he just reconstituted the program and back again, back again. We came with two programs. Hell uh, I was a representative for IJFA for sixteen years, and when the Musky War started, I got crossways with the worst Musky War the world records. The Musky Wars started ninety two, and what.
You have to explain that?
But when you're ready, okay, let's let's jump horses hair for a second. Let's go back to the seventy two pounders and work backwards. Okay, that seems to be a logical, logical way to do it.
I want to hear about the musky war.
We'll get to that.
We're going to get there.
Yeah, that's that's a big thing. Oh, by the way, Musky's Canada they even put release that's the name of their magazine, Release Journal, the Release Journal. Yeah, that's how gung ho Musky fishermenar for catching.
Right, man, those guys wud probably have to ship fit if you went spear fish and muskies.
Man.
Since you've brought up again the release thing, I want to know what makes the fish so fragile that this improper handling can cause such high mortality.
Most musky fishermen net them and then you people do not to handle them. Well, bring them in the boat. They're strong, and the fish are flopping all over the bottom of the boat beating himself all the hell. So then they get them unhooked. If they ever get them unhooked, then the muskie jumps out of the net and he's flopping around the bottom of the boat and trying to bite somebody on the leg. Anyway, the fish pretty much
beat himself up. So if you release them in the water, obviously the only thing you're gonna have to do is reach down with the flyers back the hooks outlay a measuring stick alongside them to get an idea.
I mean, well, isn't there an idea here? And it goes the same for like big pike too, but a muskie and a pike or ambus predators.
They're not the first cousins.
They're not designed to go on these big, long marathon runs.
They're like a mountain lion.
Dive bomb out of the tree, fight real hard for hopefully a very limited amount of time sprinters versus marathon runners, so that they're not going to be able to deal with this big build up of lactic acid, so it takes them way longer to recover, and during that recovery period they're susceptible to predation as well, or in the case of your older fish, they may just not be able to recover from it.
Yeah, they are terrific speed demons for short distance. They can go sixty miles an hour for a short burst. That's why all the major fins are at the back of the fish. When they wind up, they wind up into an S shape and it's just like shooting a bow out of an arrow.
How fast.
Can they hit sixty miles an hour for a short distance? Oh, kid, if you're in a twenty foot boat, they can go from one end of that boat to the editor of the boat before you can blink. That's how fast they are. But they can't keep it up. In other words, if you if I've got a friend that likes to play them before we land them, we always have getting on his case saying you're gonna get in the snag and lose the fish, just so you hurry up and get it till we can get it and let it go.
Because if you if you play them for a half like you're just there's stories in the older if there's stories in the old days of an hour fight or a half hour fight or forty five minute fight. If anybody takes more than five minutes to land the fish, unless it's a really big one, they're messing around with it, or they don't have have enough equipment to handle the fish, and they shouldn't be fishing for him in the first place.
Now, you'll hear when somebody hooks a muskie, you know, oftentimes keep rerailing, keep reeling, keep reeling. You know a lot of guides, you know you can get the fish of the boat.
Yeah, because if you keep realing, you're keeping tension on the fish. The minute you give them a split suck and of slack, they're gone.
A lot of the times they eat that bait so hard, Yeah, that they just have they're clamped on the bait. You never really got a hook set in there.
When I was working on the track instead of Eagle Lake in eighty six, we would put them in the tank of anesthetic and put them to sleep so that we could put a transmitter in them so we could pump their stomach to see what they've been eating. We had one big fish, it was probably a thirty five pound fish, and we put a mouth spreader. You know what the mouth spreader is. Put a mouth spreader in the fish to hold it over till we could put
the tube in to flush the stomach. The fish is dead asleep, just squashed that mouth spreader completely closed, just that fast, and it's a sleep. That's the power they got in those jaws. So a lot of times they'll grab that bait. They might be hooked or you think hook for three four, five minutes, and all of a sudden they look at you and they opened the mouth or they shake their head and poof. They never had a hook in.
Them that bait, particularly that bulldog right there. If you look at that bait, there's teeth marks on it. That fish that I caught on that bait did not have a single hook on it. As soon as it hit the net, opened its mouth lure Chester, Yeah, as soon as it hit the net and opened his mouth.
In the fall, particularly when I used to do a lot of sucker fishing, they would grab the sucker and my dad would always raise them up to see how big you are, because we didn't want to catch a small one. And a lot of times as they get up to where you can see him, they let it go. But if you drop it back down, they'll come right back and hit it again.
Because he never got hooked.
He never got hooked, but he never got stung either. And he's hungry. He once had he once said, sucker, but he ain't gonna let you get a look at him. We've had him drop it and pick it up three two, three, four times. And sometimes you get them, and sometimes you don't.
Tell us about this seventy two pounder. The start of the muskue wars Well.
Actually this didn't start the Muskue Wars, but it's reignited them a little bit.
Are these these? Are these?
Is this the crew you told you about the manifesto? I've got the manifesto right here?
How'd you get it?
Who do you think you're dealing with?
Okay, let's talk about that.
Yeah, right here, I'll tell you how I got it. Observer number five sent it to me. Oh, after several months on the internet talking about it. They didn't know anything about it was on the internet. They found out and he sent me this.
But he said, I think he sent it to me.
Yeah, he sent it to you. And then after he after I found out about it and put more about it on the internet, then he sent me a copy and then I called him the next day. We talked for forty minutes and okay.
Can we refresh people's memory? We were what started this whole thing of Larry being here was showed up. We got it showed in the mail. Yeah, and you know whatever. No that I was like, go through mail on my desk and there's this big thing called the Musky Manifesto, and it's photographs, documentation, all kinds of stuff and basically it's a story about how some guys got boned by
the ig F A. They caught a giant. Everybody knows it was a giant, it was a world record, and they got the fish got thrown out on a stupid technicality.
That's what they claim.
I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think i'm being I'm.
Not that that's really the meat of the deal.
Yeah, that was the meat of the deal. That's what hard started this whole conversation, and I started talking about my understanding of the muskie community and how they're touchy fellers.
There's a picture.
That's the picture I know.
When it appeared on the internet on a post that I have started, somebody sent it in with the heads cut off.
Of the This is what started this conversation is this guy saying that they had a seventy two pounder. Everybody knows it's a seventy two pounder, but they weighed on a boat and IGFA threw it out because you can't weigh fish on boats.
Now, that's not the only rule that they both broke for IJFA tell me more the case, the scale must be recertified after weighing. They said they had it checked, but they didn't tell me how they had it checked after after and it was weighing light actually, which means a fish weighed seventy three pounds.
Yeah, he talked, He said that in the manifesto. Turns out it's even bigger.
The Lynx measurement must be done on an IGFA bumpboard other words, of a measuring board on a flat surface. They didn't have that, so they couldn't comply with that rule. You had to have a picture of the rod reel and scale and photo of the f show on the
scale showing the weight. Didn't have that. In fact, the guy who wrote the manifesto was one of the five the three cousins and two uncles okay, dads of the cousins, And supposedly after the guy stood on the seat of the boat and lifted the fish up high enough for the scale to register, only two of the five guys could see the scale reading. This guy that worked the manifesto did not see it. So he's he's hanging his hat on it. That's the biggest musk he ever caught.
But he he didn't even see it. Weighed himself as far as the.
Measurement, Oh did you do some phone calls, Larry, pardon you did some phone calls about this?
Yeah, track anything big you do? Yeah, the final fly on the ointment and IJFA told me personally that had not been weighed in the boat, that there were several other things that they would have pursued before they would ever recognize it linked measurement. As I told you, it has to be done on their bump board. Here's how they did it, on the inside of the gunwale of the boat, about halfway between the gunnell and the floor. It was a fifty inch ruler stuck to the boat.
Okay, I've been in those boats.
I got one of my own.
It took all five of them to hold the fish against that tape and then they had a three foot bump measurement that they measured the other the distance past that tape were one of the guys marked the spot and then they measured and they thought it was six and a half inches. Well, IJFA would never accept that the world came to an end. So I understand that he wants his uncle to be a world record holder, but it's never going to happen, and it couldn't have
happened in those circumstances. And here's the kicker, because lack SUL is total catching, immediate release, keyword immediate. And the conservation officers, I think are a little bit leaning to let you take a picture, hu quick one. But had the seal came by, well they were monking around like this, they would have gotten a fine immediately, you think. So, yeah, no question about it.
So that rules out having a new world record in lock school, that's what you said it's going to come out of.
But I know I said it had the potential.
I have ga out the window. When you look at that picture, what do you see?
Okay?
Is it like even in the right class of Compare.
Those two pictures.
I ain't Larry's jealous.
Just fish make you jealous, Larry, that one don't because I caught it.
Okay, I see what you're saying here, So I'm supposed to. I'm looking at these two fish pretty close and just.
Going by the Yeah, but you see they look like they're pretty close to the same side.
Because they're both being held up by two people standing side by side. Yeah, you I would superficially be like, yeah, those are in the ballpark. Rough these same size fishes.
Okay, my fish was fifty seven and a quarter inches, which is slightly longer, and they claimed for their fish, we weighed on a certified scale, State certified scale. It weighed fifty four pounds four and a half ounces.
So do I see twenty pounds of blubber on that fish? The other fish doesn't have exactly twenty pounds is a pile of blobbers.
And on my thread on muskie first that ran for over three months, in fact, it's still up. There was not a single person that said it weighed sixty pounds, let alone seventy, including Dick Pearson that was referenced to a well ago when we were talking. It just is it's not there. It's not there. And in the manifest a manifesto there's eleven more pictures besides that one, and there's several pictures of it in the guy's laps, and none of the pictures except one doesn't even have a
little bit of belly. So there's just no way that fish we eight eighteen pounds more than my fish.
Way, Yeah, you if it had a socker in it.
Yeah, I mean a couple, it would have had more than a It would have had had a ten pound whitefish or something in it to.
Get weight party some lead weights.
Most people, it sounds like most people out there fishing, And maybe I'm wrong about this. I like to fish as much as a lot of fellows in this room, but that you wouldn't be prepared to officially have a record fish in your boat.
And obviously they weren't. Yeah, and it's a shame and one of the things.
When you go fishing, are you prepared?
Yes, absolutely, carry my certified scale right in the boat.
You can't weigh in the boat.
Well, we can pull right up the shore and get out.
That's not immediate release.
But fish and black soul either, Amos Saint Lawrence River. Oh, here's the thing. There might be a way you could do it on locked soil if they relax that rule a little bit and they're working on it.
Yeah, I could imagine if.
You pulled the boat to shore, if you had a cradle. You know what a cradle is, instead of a dip nut. You put the fish in the cradle, You ease the boat to shore. Somebody gets out of the boat, lifts the scale, lifts the cradle up and hooks it to the scale. You should be able to get it above the water. If you're on solid.
Grounds, well it's obviously feasibooks. I mean they're doing it on. They'll do it on like great white sharks are an e s a species, and they'll get weights off great whites and cradles. I mean, there's a way to do it right if you got the right expertise.
So that's the only way that they could have come even close to complying with ISJFA rules if they'd been prepared.
And what I've been trying to beat into people's mind is if you have any idea that you want to catch the world record muskie, or if you're fishing where the potential exists, whichever place that's got muskies it's not there, then you should have a copy of the rules, whether it's IGFA, whether it's a Fishing Hall of Fame, or whether it's a modern day muskie world record program that I've started, and have the equipment that you need to
follow those rules. And here's the kicker that you might like, since you're a meat eater, is for my program, it has to be a dead fish. They have to keep the fish. Why is that Because here's the thing, and if you read my book, you'll find what happened in the past history is a different wet sand put in fish. Coke bottles full of sand in fish to addway, oh.
Because you want to get a look inside there.
My program is we have to have a representative at the time the fish is opened, and we have to check the summit contents. We'll check it for water, we'll check it for bait, fish, we'll check it for sand and rocks.
Fish.
Fine, yeah, if they weren't stuffed in there by the angler, that's a that's gonna be a tough call if it ever happens. But depending on the size of the forage, you should be able to tell whether the musky grabbed the fish or whether it didn't.
Something fish is going on.
So you like that cow and people fitticizes some for saying, you know, we have to kill the fish, but that's one fish out of zillion.
Yeah, how often is that gonna happen?
The last big musky?
Educate your anglers and say you're gonna kill this fish because you're positive it's a new record.
Well right, and if you're smart, you got to scale on the boat to find out before you kill it.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Yeah, and I've got.
What you're saying. So this should be like a once in a once in a generation activity, right.
I mean, I've got some pictures here of I won't take them out, but uh, there's been a couple of really big fish caught out of the Saint Lawrence River in the last couple of years, and they had scales on the boat, They had lots of witnesses. Yes, they weigh on the boat, but they weren't going for a record anyway, so they just wondered how big it was. It was almost sixty pounds.
What I'm getting worried about here is I want to make sure we talk that you explain what the muskie wars were. But when you when you call a person up when you're investigating a fish, well, how many fish have you investigated in your career?
Quite a few?
I mean have you do? You have you made your living writing and fishing and guiding.
Pretty not not completely, but a good portion of it.
So yet yet points you've had a day job.
Yeah?
Yeah, what line of words.
For instance, our modern day muski modern day muskie world record is fifty eight pounds. That's the modern record. Okay, it was Cotton, Michigan, who was putt in a frazer that was in the bell Air chain, the Torch River chain. Oh yep, okay, and uh you took it to a
tax germist. One of our committee members went to the tax deermists, remeasured to fish, rewighed the fish, and then was stayed in the fraser for four four months, and they shipped it to Minnesota to have a replica, made a mold for a replica, and so I made a rainments to be there when they got the fish they thawed to fish out. I was there when it was opened.
I reweighed first to make sure it weighs close to what it was claimed to be in It was actually over because it absorbed a little bit of the water from thawing overnight. But so then I weighed the fish again. It was okay. And then when they opened the stomach it had. All it had was a skeleton of a thirteen inch small mouth. They had almost completely gone and obsousally no weight there.
He had a keeper small mouth and.
At two and a third pounds of eggs is all it had in it. So it had just started getting eggs. Got it for the fall, and this was in October, so it was it was not starting real early, probably into December before they really start building up eggs. Do it through the winner, and.
You got to personally handle the world.
Record, the modern day record.
Uh, how many fish have you investigated?
Oh, not a lot, because there's not been a lot of records caught. But I've investigated other fish then, you know, just just a modern day record.
But when you invested, like I would say, you investigated this fish, the Musky Manifest.
My investigation the world records took up the whole book. That's that's all just world records right there, And that whole thing is about the past world records.
A compendion of musky angling history, muscle lunge, World Records, the History, the Truth, the Truth eighteen seventy seventy, two thousand and six.
Right, But you've investigated far more fish than that, because you obviously debunked a few along the way.
Right, But he puts them in there, don't you.
Yeah, they're in all. Yeah.
Dot Adversary and that books.
Available on Amazon, by the way, and also Kindle if you just want to get it on your iPod, got it?
Does it get adversarial?
It can bet it didn't because I've not.
With this kid. Were you guys getting We've got along fine.
We had a nice conversation. I understood where he was coming from. He was thrilled to death for his uncle to catch the fish. Yep, and they all thought they had a world record. But from what I understand is what I was told, not from this kid, but from the resort people or people associated with the resort people. The scale they used was a twenty dollars Amazon scale. Can't be real repeatable. That's what you need for a good scale. It's got to be repeatable. So who knows.
Maybe because he jumped up on the seat and tried to get the fish up, it took him two lifts to get a tail off the ground or off the floor of the boat, and so it had to be You know, you're standing there with all that weight supposedly seventy two pounds. I mean he lifted weights a little bit, but try it sometime. It's not easy to lift forty pounds. It'll oone seventy. So whether the scale jiggled or whether the boat rocked, who knows what. Nobody believes it weighed
seventy two pounds. If they want to believe it. That's fine. More power to them that. If that's what they want, that to be their family goal, go for it. But I'm not buying it.
I ain't going in the butt.
I probably won't do any more revisions, getting too old.
Okay, tell me about what the why was the muskie? Why did the Muskie War start the year I finished high school? And is there a correlation?
I never thought about that? Okay? In nineteen ninety.
One, Oh sorry, I finished ninety three.
John Delloff, who's a amateur historian in my hometown or where I live now, Hayward.
Was called a muskie historian or historian pretty much.
He's a historian, but heavy into musky.
Okay.
Well, he decided that he was going to investigate it, and so he used his amateur photo analysis to try to debunk Arthur Lawton's sixty nine pounds fifteen ounce muskie from the Saint Lee Trevor six sixty nine to fifteen from say One Trevor, nineteen fifty seven. The thing of it is, it could have all stopped right there, had if I had had my head on straight, or if anybody else would have thought about it. The pictures that
he used to analyze. Okay, there is no way to prove that the scales that Field and Stream are, the pictures that Field and Stream published were the actual pictures of the fish. Igfa's reason for setting the record aside, and they never did do a complete disqualification. It's still instead aside status. But at that time in fifty seven, Field Stream did not require a photograph even but IGFA did, so they weren't sure that the pictures that they had were the right face, so they put it in set
aside status until another picture could be found. Well, I'd found it and produced it and had a meeting with him in two thousand and seven, but they still rejected it. But that was all boloney because when the World Record Musky Alliance challenged Cal Johnson's nineteen fifty seven or nineteen forty nine sixty seven pounder, lost my chain of thought.
You were talking about you were talking about the amateur historian.
Okay, we're off of him for a minute. Yep, the WRIM, which is a world record Musky Alliance. They were trying to prove which world record muskies were indeed legitimate.
Yeap, which these guys actually had it right.
And so they had a professional photograph interest. Now analyze the photographs as the same thing they did for spraysfish, which was sixty nine to eleven, the one that Latin beat and when they denied the Wrimes protest and also Louis Spray's protests for the hull. Anyway, IJFA said that they decided that you can't prove the weight of a fish from a two dimensional photograph, which I agree with.
But what you can prove from photogrammetry is, for instance, in the case of the Johnson fish, it was actually twenty five percent smaller than what they claimed by photo analysis of both the fresh fish and the mount after it was mounted. If you'll overlay the outline of both the mounted fish and the fresh fish is the same thing they did with sprayfish. One is way shorter than the other one ten inches in Spray's case, maybe more than that and seven and a half in Johnson's fish.
And if you come to Hayward, I'll buy you you can buy me a beer. I'll take you to the mox and Bar and show you Johnson's Mountain. I'll show you exactly how they did it. I've had quite a few beers over that fire.
At what bar?
Mox and bar hanging the mox and bar in the glass case? Still there now, still there now?
And uh and what's it say underneath it?
Well, Cal Johnson's world record muskie because they didn't want to claim world record musky because supposedly Spray's face beat it. But Spray's face was a lie anyway, So anyway, that's that's that.
It was a lie or a mistake.
It was a lie. Lily the liar I call him.
Does he have a history of line.
It started in nineteen thirty nine, because he's still alive. Everything was pretty kosher up till nineteen thirty nine. Lake of the Woods in nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty one, nineteen thirty two produced world record muskies. The biggest one of all of them was fifty eight pounds and four ounces. That was nineteen thirty two.
And this is like the heyday, right heyday of.
Lake of the Woods. But it's still to this day never produced a sixty pound fish. So in nineteen thirty nine, there was a gentleman named Percy have in Detroit, Michigan, making lures and wanting to become a big deal. So he supposedly caught a world record.
He wants to play the game.
And that was in June. Well, in July, Lewis Spray came up with one just a little bit bigger, and so he had the world record. But before the year was out, a guy who had never fished muskus before and borrowed a rod and reel, skipped work and went fishing with his buddies on Eagle Lake. By noon the first day had a sixty pound, eight ounce legitimate fish. Legit, legit. In fact, John delle office has not challenged that fish
to this day. Oh anyway, that was nineteen thirty nine. Well, Spray wasn't happy about having the record for just a short period of time. And I think the reason that he did it in the first place was coming out of the depression, the war's getting ready to go crazy, and tourism was at a low ebb and he owned a tavern. So what better way to get business than
a world record muskie. Yeah, but yeah, when he got the first one, he put it on Ice s Indey's bar, had everybody write in a book what they guessed that it weighed before they ever told it. And excuse me, anybody, how much it weighed, and then in nineteen forty he decided to do it again, but Haybard already beat him with a bigger one in nineteen forty, So this is two years in row Har's got a world record and
two years in a row. Sprays thought he had a world record, but he was already beat before it was caught. But yet he still claimed on his even on his tombstone today he relies, this remains of Lewis right, three world record muskies in his day. So he had the Hayward, Wisconsin graveyard.
Is that a picture in your book?
I don't have a picture of the tombstone, but it's in Chester's going to get one. It's in a book.
So it was all said and done. That's what he wanted on there, right, not like loving father right right.
So three times and that was that was his supposed second world record, but it wasn't. And then that same year another eagle, a fish big fish was caught sixty one pounds nine ounces, but it had already been beaten twice. So there was six record potential fish caught in two years, and four of them by the two guys with two each. So things went quiet for a while Louis moved out of Hayward, he sold his tavern. He moved to Rice Lake and bought another tavern. Kind of got out of
the muskie game. And nineteen forty seven of sixty four and a half pound fish was caught in Vadas County, Wisconsin, and of course right away the rumors start and the game. Orden said he had a pen fattening it up, and you know the usual.
Rumors, throwing kittens in a little baby pool.
Yeah, yeah, So.
That off.
He was trying to disprove every big musky that was caught, except those were caught in Hayward, with the exception of the eagle leg fish, and I don't know why he skipped those two. So anyway, he tried to discredit the hands for fishing, and he never did dispute the fact
that it was fifty eight inches long. But when the picture was taken of hands or hole in the fish, he had already gutted the fish and taken twelve pounds of spawn out of it, so it looked like it, you know, a tube that was fifty eight inches long, and it couldn't possibly weighed sixty four a half pounds, But he had certified scale, he had all the affiday it's necessary and everything. So it kind of died down. Then.
Can I tell you something. I signed up for a turk you derby one time and Elroy Wisconsin at the bar, and I got it my turkey and brought it down there and everybody had a big laugh about how I got it. The next day we stopped back down there and we come in. They're still in there.
He got it, he got it?
What did go by?
Way?
What kind of idiot.
Cost yourself there? Did you?
So?
Anyway? Nineteen forty nine, Cal Johnson caught a supposed sixty seven and a half pounder. Nice, I'd like you to do a little photo analysis, if you would. There's three pictures of his supposed sixty seven and a half pounder and one picture of a forty four pounder and they don't look much different.
And well, bottom right is a real stut.
We think before we would start this, don't you think we would say, mister Ranella, we'd like you to perform a photo analysis for the group. But before you do that, could you please tell us your background, Like how are you qualified to judge these photos?
Uh?
Just eyeballing?
I have caught a tiger musky. Wow, and many, many, many twenty four twenty two inch northerns. Yeah, and uh, these are all whoppers.
Well one of the things that was.
But I gotta say this in all seriousness, I'm not, as you know, not a seasoned muskie fisherman. I mean, maybe you can help explain it, but come on, how much can you What can you tell from any of these photos?
Not a lot actually, unless they unless they're done professionally by a photograph intrist. But the thing that struck me was I bought this magazine at a flea market and it was written Cal Johnson article written the year before he got his record out of same lake where he supposedly got his record, and that that's the picture right there. And strangely, and a year later he catches a fish that looks a lot like that fish. He claims it to weigh sixty seven and a half pounds and claims
a new world record and won an automobile. What so, this may be totally legitimate, This may be you know, it may not be that fish. It may be that fish. I don't know, I don't really care. But here's how wax record keeping was even then nineteen forty nine. This is a letter from Field and Stream, who were the world record keepers at the time.
Now at that point in time was Field and Stream. Field and Stream, because they've sold off the rights of that name and all kinds. Yeah, they were, they were, So it was affiliate with the magazine back then, right, Yeah.
So letter to Cal Johnson. We recently received a clipping covering your sixty seven and a half pound musculin's catch. Congratulations on a fine catch and setting a new world record. We'd like very much to have an entry from you in our annual fishing contest, and an entry blank is enclosed herewith for that program they actually chased the record, okay.
Also in the case of the world records, if possible, If possible, we would like to have an affidavit attesting to the accuracy of the scales on which the fish was weighed. To this day, there's never been any proof the scales were certified, and it was weighed on two different scales, as well as two or three additional witnesses to the weighing and measuring. This is not because we have any doubt as to the weight, but merely serves as a protection to both ourselves and to the angler.
If you have one or two good pictures to spare, we would appreciate receiving those also. That's how lacks World Records certification was in those days. Yep.
So when you go into looking at a fish, when you go into investigating a fish, are you hoping? And you gotta be honest? Okay, I'm trying. I want to tap into your deepest, most honest thought.
I'm ready for you.
Are you hoping it's a phony? Or are you hoping it's a new world record.
I'm glad you asked that question. When I wrote the first edition on the Compendium nineteen eighty one, I did everything I could to prove that the records were legitimate. I did not go looking for any negatives got it. If one would have popped up, I uld have jumped all over it. But my goal was to record history. That was it, and so I was trying to find every bit of information I could that would substantiate the fish.
Got it.
That was in nineteen eighty one. Nineteen ninety seven, I did an update, kind of screwed it up a little bit, but I was back on the track of these fish were bogus and then I did this third edition in two thousand and seven, and uh, that's a very very hard read volume one, because it gets so much into depth and of how we determined this, and how we
determine that, and what have you. But UH, when when dell Off first made his proposals to get Lawton's fish disqualified, I was working a lot of hours as traveling, I was moving from one town to another, and so I didn't really scrutinize it like I should have, And I regret that ever since. In fact, it keeps me awake nights.
But because you wish what would have happened.
I wish I would have looked at it closer, because as you will see if you read this, I've spent probably a fifth of that book debunking his protest, his.
His like he wasn't being fair.
Right, and he proved that out on his own self. By Uh, when the Wrima protested the sprayfish, the sixty nine to eleven fish that replaced the sixty nineteen fifteen blottonfish, he I was at that time. I was on the hall board, I was the world record advisor, and WA made the protest. It was a ninety some page this big black notebook here of all the things that they found, louis a no good son.
Of a bitch and a ninety page takedown.
They would not allow me to sit in on the meeting to review this protest, even though I'm the world record advisor for the Hall and I built that program from scratch. So I asked John Dellof, who at the time was the director of the Hall of Fame, for the president president of the Board. I says, why can't I sit in on this meeting? He says, because that's the way I want it, because he knew if I was there he couldn't control the narrative.
Yep.
In fact, he allowed me fifteen minutes to make a presentation of the board and that was it. And they had blow ups of the affidavits as big as that plane picture behind you there as well. One of the board members asked me, he says, how can you contest these affai Davids, I said, ask that gentleman there, because Lawton had five legitimate affidavids to the weight of his fish.
And when Detlof did his protest and they disqualified it, four of those witnesses came forward and re signed another alpha David the fish was legitimate, and he found three new witnesses. Three new witnesses found two of them made affidavids, and one of them was the next door neighbor to Lawtons, and he verified Detloff made up his own Affidavid for the kid to sign, so he didn't really understand what
he was signing. But what he did say in there was that on subsequent weekends that Lawton's brought home one weekend nine big fish, the biggest one was forty nine pounds, and the next week ends when he got the sixty nine to fifteen, and he was witnessed to both of them, where Deloff was trying to say that because the photographs that appeared in Field and Stream were of the forty nine pounder, that that's the one Lawton was claiming to be the sixty nine pounder yep.
And so.
Then IGFA, after the wim protests, said that you can't tell from a two dimensional photograph the weight of a fish you but Mike come back to them was but you can tell if it was phonied up enough, because the photographmetry proves that it was twenty five percent smaller than it actually claimed to be and plus you got the witnesses, the weight witness and he said the president, the current president of the IJFA, said that IGFA recognizes
all tackle records by scale weight only period. Well, we had what ten alfi, David's or so of Lawton's fish, and they won't reinstate it. I want to know why they won't answer me. But if if it's by witnessed weight on a certified scale, which it.
Was, what's the argument.
They won't tell me. They won't talk to me. They'll talk The other guys will talk to me. The record keeper now will talk to me, but the president won't talk to me. I've sent him two letters and he's not answered either one of them.
So you've lost I've lost friendships over this time.
Well absolutely, I told him you're a hypocrite. IJFA is hypocritical. You first set Lawton aside because of the photograph, but that wasn't it at all, because when it comes to Johnson's fish, it can't go by photographs, so we're gonna go by scale weight, certified Scalewaight. Well, Lawton had all that, so he said, have never been disqualified in the first place. Oh yeah, I've lost a lot of friends I lost.
You know, the guy that did the protest, the current director of the Hall of Fame was my best friend at the time, and that went by the wayside. In fact, we were supposed to go to Texas duck hunt and he had to cancel the trips so we could stay there and help build their bullshit case against the WWME protests.
So when was that?
That was in two thousand and six.
Have you ever seen guys come to blows over muskies?
I don't think so. I mean, there's a lot of bad blood in the muskie world, but there's a lot of good blood and musky world too, I mean the serious I know all the top names in the game.
Yep.
Fished with a lot of them, friends with a lot of them. My personal guide on the Saint Lawrence River is probably the best on the planet. I'm piassed a little bit, but he's caught over fifty to fifty pounders. You know, Wow, there's nobody in history, I mean very few muskerfish and I ever catch a thirty pounder, let alone a fifty pound He's caught two fifty eight and
a half pounders. His clients have called him, but he was the guide to mean, in my mind that fish that I showed you that I called it was his fish. He was He put us on the fish. I just reeled it in.
But what do you think about like a what do you think about a world, a subset of fishing, hunting, subset whatever that gets to where everything, you know, it just winds up being that every picture is is like, how what an idiot someone is? They did that wrong. They caught a big one, but they were lucky. They didn't deserve it. They must have been lying.
That's jealousy at most of it. Yeah, there's a lot of that goes on. But you know, the guys that are consistent, they're respected. They're respected most of them. I mean, there's there's always some screwballs that make fun or deny anything, yep, But for the most part, like this fish, let's say I did weigh seventy two pounds. If it had been
properly documented, we would be celebrating it. The one thing that blew me away and I kind of got that explained to me when I talked to Observing number five that anybody in the musky world that I know, if they catch the world record, they're gonna be screaming from the rooftops. Yeah, I mean, and some guys would be looking for sponsorships and whatever and free taxidermy the whole nine yards. But not a peep out of these guys. And so I put a challenge on the post that
I made a muskie first and not a peep. And I thought the guy that published the picture without the heads was one of the group. Well it turns out that when I talked to observing number five, he said that it's obviously one of our our inner circle, but we don't know who it was. It wasn't one of the five. So that's that's one thing that had thrown me, is why we weren't hearing from him back, like, well, show you a picture and won't tell you nothing else.
And you know, I emailed this guy private email a couple of times and never got any response because he wasn't burt of the group. He didn't know anything.
Was there a time when you how bad did you want to be a world record holder?
Since nineteen fifty seven you were hoping for that to happen.
I mean that have you given up or you think you still got a chance.
I still got a shot But here's the thing. You've got a fish where they are. And I always tell people, if you want to catch a big musky, you've got to go where big muskies live.
Amen.
And if you don't, your odds are zero. And that's that's one of the things about you know, we promote catch and release for everybody of water because all of them can be hurt with too much pressure and too much harvests, as I've proven, I think based on mortality, and the more newros, newcomers that come to the game and don't not handle these fish, it's gonna get worse. So we need to start a bigger education program on how to handle these fish. But you know, experience tops everything.
You've got to handle a few of them to learn how to handle them. So it's a double edged sword. But if we get too many at one thrust in the game and they don't want to handle them, they're gonna kill everything to catch and we'll be back to the mid nineteen fifties and one hundred thousand fish go to the grave every tear.
You know what this guy's actual name is, Musky Chat, Musky Chet. This guy's coming hot on your hot on your heels.
Dude, welcome. In fact, I've been trying to find somebody to take over for me because I'm not gonna live forever.
There we go, I'll be the next musky.
You got a spare room?
Unfortunately no, but I need somebody to move in for a while. The problem I've got And I was talking to Krint Carimat at lunch today, I said, if you were to saw the top of my head off, got you a bunch of little musky swim around.
If it wasn't muskies, what would have what do you think it would have been? Because you know what, oh you already I.
Was a big time duck hunter for a long time. Yeah, yeah, do.
You feel like he got a little bit of a do you got? Do you feel like you got like some like a O C D or like uh or like like do you feel that if it was for muskies, you would have been into something that you can count, probably something that you could qualify.
Probably.
Yeah. We met a guy he passed away recently that was an antler collector. Okay, right, And if God had never put antlers on deer, that's some bit would been collecting something. I don't know what it would have been. It would have been petrified rocks. It would have been like something he.
Was born to collect to collect.
It's just like a freak chance sort of that he got onto antlers.
I've got all kinds of collections, Musky pins, musky buttons, musky patches, musky bottles, musky wineglasses, musky beer cans, you name it, musky, I got it.
It's just do you feel like, are you glad about it? Are you ever afraid you'd someday be like, God, damn it? Really muskies, no whole life.
No, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I wouldn't go back and start something different. I'm happy with where I've been and still going.
So how do you feel about the fate of the fishery.
I'm worried about the new handling explosion, new anglers, and I'm worried about Ford facing sonar. If the guys use it ethically, I got no problem with it.
What's an ethical way versus a not ethical way?
Okay? Muskies, Big Muskies spend a lot of time in deep water bear trauma.
Is that same with the same with northerns.
Yeah, big, the big, Northern, small, Northern stay shallow yep So if in the summertime, when the water surface temperature seventy five, seventy eight, even eighty degrees and you're pulling a fish out of forty feet of water that's probably sixty eight degrees down there, you're gonna kill it fish pretty much. That's where the ethics come in.
Yeah, but you're gonna use this technology. They're gonna handle more fish, They're gonna be catching more fish in their own places. They're gonna be maybe not so educated on how to deal with them once they do catch them. And it's just each fish is gonna be more exposed to more higher likelihood of getting handled.
Hearing this, Yeah, so I've got this is like I said, this topic is opening up a can of worms. There are some spot faced sonars there. There's absolutely no doubt that it helps you catch fish.
Oh absolutely, there's that badfish. Guides are loving it.
Yeah, that's that's not propies are.
Going to put the first one to suffer the things that.
Oh that this has to be very self governing, which is very hard to do. Exactly if people are just
catching fish and not handling correctly, Yeah, that's a problem. However, there are arguments to be had how forward facing sonar can educate you if learned how to use it property Like if you are fishing, for example, on a break line right that is in ten feet of water, but it's close to forty feet of water, and you can't see down in some deep weeds or something where muskies could be, you know, being caught, and you're casting this
break line. The water temperature is pushing eighty degrees and all of a sudden you see a muskie shoot up out of that forty feet of water into the ten feet of water and you catch them. That's probably not a good thing, but you just learned something there with live sonar that would be really hard to learn if you didn't have it.
Oh well, yeah, I'm very simpathetic to what you're saying right now, is that, uh, it educates, and all this technology, not all that much of the technology educates. We used to like at our area where we are in southeast Alaska. If you to I'm not kidding. If you'd come to me ten years ago, not even ten years ago, eight years ago, seven years ago, you'd come to me, I would have said, for some weird reason, we don't have link cod where we're at. I would have said that
up until a very like definable moment. I would have said that until I got my hands on navionics. Once I got my hands on navionics, I'm like, oh shit, was linkoind all over place? I just never knew. I never understood the contours. We used to fish off marine charts with like like handfuls of uh fathom readings on marine charts, paper marine charts. Once I knew, like, oh my god, this's like that down there, and there's specific ridgelines and specific pinnacle tops and like that one doesn't,
this one does, that one doesn't. It's hugely educational. I've learned so much about Lincott I'll tell you an art thing. We've cleaned a lot of Lincott off a lot of hilltops. It's like they go, you know, so the the new, the all the knowledge and information is great, it's beautiful, but you can hurt of fisher. Well, we never scratched those fish. We never ever scratched those fish, but you could. I know where they're at now.
The first thing to like coming into ethics as far as you're hunting, when you fly into do go hunting in Alaska, Canada, you can't hunt the same day, right, correct, that's that's ethics. That's the same thing. I look at the forward fishing Somar. If you're going to run.
I would argue ethics would be that you could, but choose not to.
Yeah, but the law is the law.
Well, the law is the law.
The law is but it's the law for a reason.
Yeah, we're getting a little bit chicken under the egg here, but yeah, you're right. Yeah, we we codify ethics, like we have laws that are meant to like lay down ethical understandings, right, Like we don't murder is not illegal because you know, you create a lot of like yeah, you create a lot of paperwork and big messes. It's like illegal because they've ethically decided that fracture side is bad. Yeah, you're right. Like a lot of a lot of law
springs from ethics. A lot of method to take law and Baglin's and all that also spring from how would you put it resource management.
There's one Canadian bologists been on the forums that where he is. He's in Manitoba. They have a none overrule red river big and catfit. Ye, well, you can keep them up to a certain size, but you can't keep any over that size because it's your breeders, and that's what he'd like to see happened to muskies, which would eliminate any possible future rural record obviously.
But yeah, but you see what he's got a point that's pretty common in fisheries, right.
Yeah, Well, there's a lot of slot limits to maintain enough fish in the fishery to keep it going. So you control by side limits of controlled by by bag limits. Uh, one of the lakes and Hayward there, they just went to a five bag panfish limit this year of any species of panfish. Five can't keep more than five because they were slaughtered them. They can't. They can't take that kind of pressure.
They couldn't settle on something like a little more compromin five five. Yeah, I said, how about.
I'm not a pan fisherman, so I don't care.
But you're like, I got this barrel scaler I'm real fond of and it doesn't start spinning until there's thirty fishing muzz.
Well, sell the bucket scaler. Now what lake was that?
It's most lake Okay, it's east of Hayward twenty five miles.
Got it.
If you find the panfish sometimes you find the muskies.
Though Chester.
Do you have aspirations of being a world record holder?
Uh? I mean if I got got a big fish, like, for instance, Cal and I. One time we're out on a lake recent a couple of years ago around here, we caught a giant fish. We were not prepared. Do I really care that I would? You know? Could you know? It probably wasn't. I don't think could.
I think it was, though, but go ahead?
Could have like a state record. I don't necessarily think it. I care about having my name number one, but it'd just be nice to kind of know when my heart how big that fish was, you know. So like next time I I'm out in Wisconsin, you know, on a big fish water, I will I will be equipped with the right tools to actually know how big that fish is.
Oh, if someone said to me, would you like a state record fish? I would say emphatically yes.
Yes, right, yeah, I mean they.
Said why, I'd be like, I'm not sure, but I know that I do.
Fish is great.
It's just a normal progression of mine. You want more and more and more better, better, better, bigger, bigger, bigger.
Yeah, it's pretty fun. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and he was talking about how like trophy l hunts are bad for recruitment. I was like, well, why is that. He's like, have you ever ever run into some dude who paid twenty five thousand dollars to go on this super exclusive, big time el hunt and was like, and by the way, my six year old kid's going to be with us, He's going to be screwing everything up. And I was like, no, I guess I haven't.
Unless I'm that following saying.
He's like, he's like big time hunts don't propagate hunting because it's like he's like that the group of folks, they're not bringing the kids along.
Yeah. No, I'm with you. Yeah, I'm with you. I don't know that entirely, but I should get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, I could see something like that happened to me and being right away in my head being like, I'm not bringing all my freaking kids.
Right, I'm the how much time.
Are we at?
We're at time to wrap it out?
I wanted to talk go ahead, hit worry about fishing more actually fishing muskies.
Yeah, give him the big one.
There's there's one that I know the answer to this, and I know what you're going to say, But the fish of a ten thousand casts, you know, that's what everyone calls the muskie. Yeah, we could talk about fishing.
For Have you calculated it out? How many casts?
That's not quite that many.
I mean that would be one cast every minute for roughly seven days straight.
And that was born a fact. Then in the mid nineteen hundreds, when they were killing one hundred thousand muskies a year, it probably took that many. But today, if you take more than a thousand casts, you're in the wrong spot. You're not doing something right. In fact, if.
You had to catch a big musky, are you throwing baits or you're using a live.
Bait throwing baits almost exclusively just.
Because you're covering water.
Covering water, and you're going to get in front of a big fish if you're on big fish water. For instance, when I first started going out yeast, we fished five days in July. We were there for five days. We catch twenty four fish, three of us yeah, and six of those would be fifty inches. Go back in August for another five days freezer fillers and catch forty in five days, and six of them over fifty inches hotter water, the fish are more active, metabolism is high, and they're
going crazy, and they're stupid fish. It's not quite that good now because we've beat the hell out of them for twenty eight years, so in fact more than that. But they're getting they're getting a little educated, harder to catch up. But we're still Last year was not a normal year. But on a normal year, three of us in the two weeks we should catch six or eight fifty inch fish or bigger, up to fifty seven fifty eight.
My buddy who was nine weeks in a coma with COVID, got out of COVID, got a little bit healthy that when the Canadian border was closed with got a word they were going to open it up. At midnight on the night of opening, we were sitting at the border station in New York ready to go. And two days later, three days later, Saturday Sundays, two days later, you got a fifty eight and a half incher with a fourteen inch head. Imagine there's a fourteen inch fourteen and a
half inch head. It's just incredible. It's incredible.
What are you?
Two last questions for me, how many musky baits?
Do you have, Well, I don't have as many as I used to have, but I've probably still got several hundred.
It seems like musky guys like their base.
Here's the thing that drives me crazy being an author. These guys that are the nutcases would rather spend one hundred dollars on their seven hundred musky lure than to spend thirty five bucks for a book that explains the history of their part. It makes me crazy.
Another question, what boat you fishing out of?
Ranger?
Normally nice?
You know when you're talking about the fish of ten thousand casts and you calculate it out, how long you have to do that? Yeah? Kind of One of the highlights of my dad's life is a guy wrote an article about his still hunting method, and you put down how many steps and how long he waits, and my dad wrote a letter to the editor saying that he'd still be forty yards from his truck at the end.
Of the day or something.
Highlight of his life got to publish.
That is hilarious.
Yeah, none of the couple hundred lures that you have larry a couple hundred baits that you have. If you had to be like you can only take five across the border to Canada.
What would those five be?
Four of the five would be bucktails in one surface bait.
I got a question for you. You think Chester is an idiot for using those lures.
Those are two of the deadlish lures on the planet.
Good for Chester, job?
Yeah, this thing is catching so many giant fish. The only problem I got with this bait is if you're not properly tooled up. The fish swallow these things practically and they'll get hooked back deep in the gills.
They want to eat that thing, Their lips hit it and they think it's real.
So you got to have a tool. It's called a hook pick. It'll reach in there and like if they get hook over the gill raker, you can actually lift that hook up, push it backwards a little bit, lift it up and pull it out without ripping the gill out of the fish.
How much money got sunk into this lure?
Chester? That lure?
Uh?
I want to say, I can't quite remember. I'd say that's this.
This is a Suey was developed in the thirties by a guy named Frank Suey. He caught a musky day for thirty days out of Pelican Lake. The lake owners had a petition to the governor to get him banned from fishing.
And back in the day when you'd write the governor, they wanted him to stop because he's going to clean the lake out.
Yeah, because you kept every one of them that was in a key. What years did your grandfather fish man?
So he died, Get bear with me minute. He died in around eighty four, at eighty.
Okay, help me out here.
He was not much so by when I was born, when I was a little kid, he was not that active. So I would say fifties and sixties. He's a big muscard.
That's everybody kept him and a one hundred thousand a year died and d n R tried like hell to make enough babies just replace them, and fishing was tough enough day.
Yeah, he was from a farm and what is now Naperville, Illinois. She'd never guess you could be from a farm there. It was orchards and stuff. He was from a farm there. And when on when they went on vacations, they would go up into Wisconsin to fish muskiees like that was what he did.
I mean, Wisconsin was the muskie mecca of North America for a long time, actually formal muskie fish. He started on the Saint Lawrence River in eighteen eighties in both Quebec and Ontario, New York, and then it graduated inland to Chautauqua Lake, New York, which small body water produces a lot of fish thousands, but they stocked a hell of it. They stuck like thirteen thousand a year there.
Two.
Yep. You want to know something that chaps my ass, Larry in Wisconsin?
What But.
In Wisconsin they've been trying to push to get pike spearing through the ice, and you know who blocks it, the musky community. The muskie community feels like an American angler can't distinguish between the northern and a muskie. So the minu, you let them spear pike through the ice, they're gonna start killing muskies. Friend of mine pointing out out you can count on people to tell one kind of duck from another. You can count on them to tell whether a spike antler is three inches or three
and a quarter inches. You can count on them to I could go on no, no, no, which I can't count on them to tell a muskie from a pike. What do you think about that?
Uh, it's possible.
Would you support did you stand strong with pike spears?
I to stand against any spirit? What about surgeon spir Now I understand him. Like in Michigan you can steal spear muskies in Michigan you can't. Only one a year now used to be carte blanche, but now it's only one a year.
But you don't like any through the ice spearing.
I don't like any through the ice catching either. Fact. To give you an example where I where I fish to wrap it up? Where I fish on the Saint Lawrence River.
Huh.
Until this year, the season for muskies didn't close until March thirty. First, well from sometimes mid December at least late December to the end of March. It's froze up. Not a big deal, but you could actually fish for them legitimately with rod and reel until the end of March,
which means you're catching an egg laden fom. But the reason that they're cutting it back to December nineteenth will be the date next year is because in the last few years have been killing so many really big muskies through the ice ice fishing.
Oh, like, are you ever calling through the ice.
No, I only tried once. I'm not an ice fisherman.
Last year it stayed Lake State open, so guys were fishing open water into.
This opened up early this year.
Too.
It's crazy.
One last question, how big are you on the following moon phases and musky fishing?
You know, I kept track of that for years, and I tried to be faithful to them, and I found I catched just as many in between simler periods as I did on them, So I just quit worrying about it. Now. My guide he's religious about we're getting close to a period, we're going to be on a good spot, and sometimes it paid off and sometimes don't. Sometimes we catch big fishings nowhere near a period, so he can believe if he wants. I don't believe.
And what we're talking about there is like moon rise as soon as the moon's coming out, moon set or moon moon overhead are like.
My opinion is that because people believe that that's when they're fishing. They're not off periods, they're not off onny out there on the off hours, but when it's moon up time or moonset and time, they're out there.
Yeah, it's like we're getting them on shar troops. What you been using for a long time?
Black bucktail with a silver spinner blade, that was they're probably up until say nineteen seventy. There's probably more musk he's caught on that one color combination bucktail then all the other musky baites put together there. That's just because that's whatever Foddy was throwing.
H guess what I got know one for you? Do you get excited about catching a tiger muskie? You know?
I for years said I'll killing mount the first tiger musky ever catch. It took me quite a few years, and I caught it out of a place. I didn't ever dream to catch a tiger musky. But it's on my wall. But I love tigers, in fact, almost more than muskies. No way, I love tigers.
Did you fry it up? Yeah?
But I've caught bigger one sincing and put them.
Back all right, Larry, thanks for coming on, man, I love it. People buy your book.
Well, I don't care if they do. They don't. They don't want to know what's going on.
It's called look a gift horse in the mouth.
If you want to know what's going on, If you want to know everything you want everyone to know about past world record muskies. Larry, Why why is an asterisk in the title?
Where's the that's not an asterisk. That's an explanation of the word compendium.
Oh yeah, And then you go to where go down below.
And explains what a compendium is?
Okay?
So a Compendium of Musky Angling History Revised, Updated and expanded, third edition, Volume one, Muscle Lunge World Records, the History the truth.
There's the keyword right there.
Circa nineteen eighteen seventy seventy, two thousand and six. A compendium, If you want what the hell that means? A compendium gathers together and presents, in a concise or outlined form, all the essential facts and details of a subject. Bingle by Larry Ramsell.
You may want to get volume two. There's a real important quote here at the back. You know, on the back of books how they put quotes from other authors or historians are scientific journals and stuff. This one at the bottom says, who's that buy me my best work?
Yeah, Larry, I'm gonna put an asterisk next to this, and you're gonna there's gonna be two asterisks next to your name and you're gonna go down to that second asterisk and it's gonna say a man obsessed pretty much.
Yeah, Larry Ramsey, that's great.
Yeah, man pretty much.
Heavy girlfriend, give me a ring. Next memorial, Man, we're gonna mop up on spawning bluegills. Okay, I know about a hot bobber bite that we just hit it pretty good.
She has bowed with muskies. I had to do most of the.
Work, all right, Larry, thanks for coming on. Good luck with your continued good luck with your book. And if I catch a world record muskie while you're still on Earth, I'm just gonna keep my mouth.
Shut or call me before you speak.
Thank you very much, Larry.
Okay, thank you.
Next word.
I love fishing loures. I love to cast them while I'm drinking a course for while on the rocks, I'm drinking adures. Clever, little mechanic, cold words of odd. I love fishing lures.
Got a hot tackle.
Box of them, with't want any fewer. I bet I'm a better.
Fisher man than you are.
When I'm at this morning good store, I love loading.
Up my car.
Some are striped summer pall and dotted big treble hook. Sometimes your line gets noted. Some dive deep, some skinter on top of the water.
Look at that big bass. I'm glad that I caught her.
Some are monkeys, Some are articulated, some are simple, some are complicated. Some of them spin, some of them rattle.
All kinds of exotic cops as your voting paddle.
I love fishing, lose.
Without them in my life.
I would be poor.
Some are so effective I think I could catch fishing a sewer. Lots of well designed little hats.
Oh love fishing. LuSE something of joining that professional bass fishing tour. Some hundred year old lax, others are newer. I love the way.
They dive in.
Some are completed, others are spotted. You think I'm missing a lure, I've probably got it. Some going back and forth like a tea or totter.
My dog brings me good luck.
I'm glad I brought her.
Some are pretty light, others ardwaighted. I want to keep casting fishing mores on upbeited fish arlurking in the shadows.
Gotta lure the mount before my mind gets at Oh.
I love fishing.
Loes