The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 569: The Musky Wars

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Larry Ramsell, Ryan Callaghan, Chester Floyd, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: Books by the reel musky expert; the man at the end of the line; if we didn’t have catch and release for muskies, we’d have fried them all; all muskies all the time; two different species?; the best way to handle a musky; the world record wars; contextualizing and challenging the "musky manifesto"; photometry; how live sonar can educate; standing against spearing and catching through the ice; tiger muskies; and more.  Outro song "Fishing Lures" by Peter Block. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yeah. I was all fired up. Yanni just put one of those little magnifying lenses in his thing. Yeah. Because your pins get blurry. Oh, my gosh. I went from having two pins to, well, I still have two pins, but I was seeing four. Yeah, you're going to want to take it right back out.

Here's what you're going to want to do. I went down that whole path, okay? And this is in the peep sight? Yeah, so when you start getting old man vision okay and you need reading glasses your pin when you're shooting archery your pin 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's they called yeah it's a clear no yeah gosh clarifier whatever it is yeah and you put it in 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 of its glory and this is my experience to a t okay so far you think this is the greatest thing in the world i'm gonna start just you know robin hood and all my arrows then what'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 hawk the hog will cease to exist and you'd be like what happened and you let down and you look and there he is and then you draw back how's he keep doing that and you let down look he's still there and you draw back that's what's going to happen to you my friend join today by world muskie fisherman guide author someone who's devoted his life to muskie

history larry ramsell ramsell ramsell what do you like larry ramsell ramsell yep fresh out of wisconsin we recently we had a number of episodes recently where we brought up controversies surrounding the muskellunge how do you like to say it that's proper okay we call them muskies of course but the proper name is muskellunge a lot of controversies around muskies oh boy people being like i caught the real world record but they won't accept it yeah and we kept saying and i said i'm gonna get a we should find a certified real muskie expert. A number of people wrote in saying, if you're going to talk to the real muskie expert, the

man at the end of the line. Let's hope. That's a turn of phrase. It'd be Larry. I just made that up. That's good. It'd be Larry Ramsel. Should write that down.

Yeah. I may, uh, may not know what questions you're going to ask, but I'll know the answer to at least 95% 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? And are you part of the muskie community? Yes, I am. I'm in it up to my ears. My dad started with the neighbor, caught a nice fish and that opened the door and away we went at what age uh i well i was probably seven or eight when he started catching them but i caught my first legal one when i was 13 and been at it for three years wow you guys probably ate them

back then huh ate every one of them no can i tell you like an apocryphal family story you can tell me if you've ever heard of this okay perhaps apocryphal family story my maternal grandfather was a musky fisherman i heard that on your podcast yeah he likes to talk about they would harness rig a chipmunk yep and put it on a board out in a pond yeah and then you paddle the shore and pull the chipmunk off the board with your rod. Yeah. 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, anything that's. So you've heard these stories. Oh, yes. Have you witnessed some of these stories? No, not that one. Okay. So I can keep telling that story. So you've heard these stories. Oh yes. Have you witnessed some of these stories? No, not that one. Okay.

So I can keep telling that story. It would likely work. Okay. I'm going to keep telling that story. But, uh. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Illinois and we fished always in Wisconsin, Hayward area.

Okay. So started when I was knee high to a 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. Yeah.

I fished one half a day last week, but I fished three weeks here in Canada. That's where the big ones are. Got it. If you had to define the muskie 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 50 years, had there not been catch and release come into vogue, there wouldn't be any left. Do you think so? Absolutely guaranteed. They would have fried them all. They would have wouldn't be any left do you think so absolutely

guaranteed they'd have fried them all they would have fried them all yeah you think so yeah that that takes some five to six years before they spawn and they're not very productive at that rate and then they'll live to 20 to 30 years old and it takes a long time for them to get there and they're too valuable to catch just once there's legions of stories of the same same fish being caught 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 when 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. 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 one one time. I left the head on and she put an apple in the mouth the whole. Seriously? Oh, yeah. I've got a picture. It's pretty cool looking. How long have you been married?

Which time? Oh, first time. First time was 10 years. The second time was 17. The third time was, I don't know, three or four. What do you think goes wrong? Is it too much fishing? Probably.

Just give it a cumulative number then. Just say 41. I've been living with the gal I live with now for 15 years, but we're not married. You gave up on that whole scene. It's working out better this way. 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. Yeah, I got you. I should say muskies the only thing i fish 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 i'd 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 rod only yeah how many states you fish muskies in 22 states and two provinces of canada okay how many states are they from right now there's 38 states that have muskies

or tiger muskies no no no i mean how where are where is the fish native to and where all has it been spread to the uh the upper midwest wisconsin minnesota michigan ohio pennsylvania The upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, the Ohio River system through down into Kentucky. There were muskies in Tennessee. They did at one time range as far as northern Alabama, native, but they're not there anymore. Okay. And then, uh, you know, people started catching them and such pressure got on the fisheries that the DNR, for instance, in Wisconsin had to build two of the world's finest muskie hatcheries just

to keep up with the harvest of a hundred thousand muskies a year. And then it just, it couldn't keep up with it. So that's why catch and release and you call it 2.0. It's been 2.0 since the late seventies. That's why. Oh, that's when the muskie. That's when catch and release in the, you call it 2.0. It's been 2.0 since the late seventies. Oh, that's when the muskie. 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 left 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 limit was 28 inches a day, two fish per day. Hold on.

Where was that again? In Ontario. Okay. And tell me the size limit again. Pardon me? In Ontario. It was 28 inches, two a day. Okay.

Minimum size, 28 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 in a little bit too, but 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 54 inch size limit on them. Hmm. Quite a change. That's a hell of a jump. Yeah. Quite a change from 28.

I remember everybody's worked up when, when I was a kid and they moved Northern's from 21 to 24, you'd have thought they'd, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's, you know, my dad never released muskies in his life.

In fact, he netted one once that I released. That'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 fishing muskies in and I couldn't convince him that 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 dr laboe tries to say there's two different species. The fishery world isn't buying that, but yet they kind of buy it when they went to a 54-inch size limit for the trophy lakes. Well, the lakes, here's how it works. The lakes that's always had muskies but never had pike are called allopatric. Those populations spawn once and have no competition from pike so they don't grow big

waters like the saint lawrence river and the georgian bay and you know lake huron like saint claire those waters have always had pike in them that's called sympatric so those fish have the potential to grow big and they've evolved a different strategy for spawning. They spawn in deeper water than 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 spawn in and wherever 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 lake, 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 were done on eggs in muskies were anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000. What a big, mature female, big, using that term loosely. But what we found was that the bigger fish in the St. Patrick waters, like Eagle Lake or Georgian Bay or St. Lawrence River, they spawn twice and they can have up to 850,000 eggs. Okay.

And they have to spawn twice because they can only mature 50% of the eggs in the first go around. And then they dump that. And then a week to 10 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, but twice annually or twice in a lifetime? Twice in the spring. Okay, so twice annually.

Every spring. Okay. Yeah. And they spawn until they get right up to the end. If they're 30 years old, they're still spawning. A lot of people think that as they get older, their eggs aren't, you know, they don't spawn anymore, the eggs aren't any good, they're not viable.

But that's not true. They do very well right up until they die. I want to get into the whole record but question but i want to lay out a little more biology for people biology for people first um how can someone when you said that someone argues it's two species i mean how could that possibly be true well the scientists 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-1900s biologists tentatively agreed or agreed to agree that there were three subspecies of muskies okay 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 allopatric fish and

sympatric Populations that were totally different and grew differently and spawned differently then they changed their thinking When dr. Lebeau did his doctoral thesis, which I worked with for the whole summer of 1986 on Eagle Lake and Wabagoon Lake in northwestern, Ontario his hypothesis was that there are two distinct species of muskies. One being the smaller strain, the smaller population, the allopatric fish, and the big ones being the sympatric populations, the big water fish. Yep.

So when musky guys are saying that some lake has some strain, what are they talking about? Or they put some strain in there. 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 their big thing today is genetic preservation. In other words, this lake is genetically different than this lake, then you don't mix them up. For over 100 years, Wisconsin raised fish in their hatcheries, stocked them wherever. In fact, in the early days, they put them on a train.

And every whistle stop, if you wanted some muskies for your lake, you 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 muskie lakes, except the ones that are connected to the river systems gotcha so they kind of lost track of the fish for a while but

they didn't keep even try to keep track it was 1933 before the wisconsin dnr even started keeping stocking records so everything that happened from 1900 to 1933 nobody knows and of course everybody's long gone now, so there's no records anywhere of what was done. And they did that up until 2006. 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 54 inches and 38 pounds in 10 years. The Mississippi fish. The Mississippi River strain. These came out of Leech Lake in Minnesota, which is connected to the Mississippi River. So that's, you know, we—

When you say we, Wisconsinites? 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 50 years, they had created a lake. It's called Bone lake in in western wisconsin it was not a native muskie lake so for 50 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 hatchery strain of fish yeah in other words they take the

eggs from there raise them in a hatchery and put them back in there. Plus stock from wherever they were getting their eggs from. Yeah. And he proved that that's exactly what they did. So he shut them off from ever using that lake again for eggs. Got it. So if you go to the Spooner Hatchery, Spooner, Wisconsin, they've got a area where you walk into and you look down into the hatchery floor. And around the windows, they've got pictures in one of the pictures they show them taking eggs from a 28 incher the geneticist 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 100 years is where they came from what are their genetics do they have the capability to grow big which they didn't and so that's why we were wanting to change strains 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 15 20 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 1800s you go back to the early 1900s is there something to suggest that back then there was a bunch of giant muskies running around? No, but every time a giant muskie was caught, it made big news.

Okay. And so that's what muskie fishermen fed on. And there's different stages. Newcomers, they're happy to catch a 30-incher just to say they caught a muskie. 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 you always want to catch more and more and more, bigger, bigger, bigger. I'm struggling to phrase a question I'm trying to ask here.

Is it muskie conservation, or is it just wanting big muskies no matter how you get them? It's a combination. Okay. But here's the thing. There are some lakes that will never produce a fish over 35 pounds. More than likely it's an allopatric lake, although I've got an example of a sympatric lake that's in that position. But, uh, so for instance, I used to tell people in my seminars, if you, if your lake record where

you're fishing is 35 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, uh, um, what's Kaufman's first name?

Carl. Kevin Monteith and. Oh, Matt. Matt Kaufman. Where's he from? Well, they do,

they work on mule deer. Oh. They work on ungulates. No, I'm not familiar. Well, I don't know that this is applicable, but they've gone in on a totally different thing.

Not even apples and oranges. It different thing not even apples and oranges it's farther apart than apples and oranges okay maybe maybe it's far apart it's muskies and mule deer m words so they share m's 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. 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

in the areas that have the no good genetics and you move them to a new place. Guess what? Wasn't genetics. 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 utero nutrition like right but i'm not getting into that

with fish i'm just saying like all this this i 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 is 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. Stress, pressures. Let me give you one example of the sympatric population that I have in mind. I've got some friends that fish there religiously,

and they're very good fishermen, and they've caught over 900 fish. But they've never caught a 50-incher, even though they're the population of fish that you would think has the potential to grow big but they're in a lake with pike okay but there's so few spawning areas for the pike that the muskets control them quite easily and so it's a uh 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 yeah because the pike don't get big i mean they catch a nice one every once in a while but most of them are you know hammer handles yeah so that's a

a sympatric situation that if they were put someplace else, like a bigger water, if they were moved to the St. 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 a need to get bigger. Yeah. They just have stopped at about almost 50 inches. They're keeping in line with their surroundings and ecosystem.

And their needs. Versus being in a bigger ecosystem, they could grow all they want and never outpace that ecosystem. Right. Right. Your girlfriend now, does she like to fish muskies? No. Bluegills with a bobber. Worms. Oh, does she like to fish muskies? No.

Bluegills with a bobber. Worms. Oh, I'll go with her, man. I'm going to steal your girlfriend, Larry. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. 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, Laxul has the potential. What's that? Since that's what started this whole thing, me getting me involved here.

Laxul was where that 72, suppose that 72 pounder came from. Yep. 72.2 is what they called it officially. But that lake, and you probably didn't know this, is catch and immediate release only. Can't keep anything there. Okay. Tell us where this lake is. It's in northwestern Ontario.

Okay. Or northern Ontario. It's getting towards the northern part of the Muskie Range. And is it a big river chain? It's a big reservoir. Oh, a big reservoir. It's a dammed Northern part of the Muskie range. And is it, is it a, is it a big river chain? It's a big reservoir. Oh, big reservoir. It's a dammed river system.

Yup. Um, and so. It's got some studs in it. It's got some, it's got some big fish. Now there's never been a wade that I'm aware of, of any over 60 pounds, but there's been a lot of 60 inch class fish, long, long fish. In fact, I guided a friend of mine's son to a 57 incher there so they they get they get long they just don't get 70 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 95 that most of them are bogus can i read this to you this kind of covers a ton of stuff. This is written by Gord Pizer, who used to be the fisheries manager for the Lake of the Woods area, Kenora, Ontario. Okay. And he's on my Modern Day Muskie World Record Committee. Okay.

And he talks about in here Dr. John Castleman, who your friend Patrick Durkin wrote about in that thing he did. And Dr. Castleman is also on my committee, and he acknowledges the foremost muskie scientist on the planet. Got it. Okay. If we could reduce the handling mortality of big muskies by only 4%, we would increase the muskie population by a staggering 70%. What?

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 calithrum study, that's this bone here, this is what they use now to age how old a muskie is. They used to use scales, but after age 10, the edges wear off and they weren't accurate. Got it. So that's why they went to this. It calculated mortality rates, muskulins mortality rates, and compared them to the muskulins 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 age of the fish may have decreased by two years from 23 to 21 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 muskie lay more eggs than the smaller fish, and that the mammoth muskelunge nearly always result from the very largest year classes. When we view it in this context, Castleman Crossman concluded that we would need a 70% increase in annual recruitment to ensure the same number of free fish reach their maximum age and

thus maximum trophy size. Follow that? Okay. Now let me read your mind. I'll bet you're wondering if 99% of the muskies are being released, which is about what it runs. He read my mind. At least 95%. Yeah. How could the age of the oldest trophy-sized fish be decreasing? Good question, right?

Two likely reasons. The ranks of the muskie fraternity are swelling at the same time that our knowledge base is better than ever before. There are quite simply more of us muskie 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 to 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 what he means. Got to give Dick credit, too, for walking the walk. Talk. He wrote The Amazing Muskies on the Shield, one of the most comprehensive how-to books on muskie fishing. But if you recall the front cover, it doesn't feature an angler holding a muskie, as you would suspect, but rather a beautiful lake 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 InFisherman and he's on the InFisherman TV show. 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 and for the rest of our muskie fishing careers and in the process reduce 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 70 percent in other words their recruitment is poor yep and if there's not any left to spawn it's really poor. Let's give Castleman and Crossman the last word on the subject. The largest trophy muskeling 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 muskellunge. 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 a population. We don't need any more information, studies, nothing. It's already figured

out by folks who have 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 eagle shots. What are eagle shots? Eagle. Holding the fish for a picture. Yeah. Just for the eagle.

You know a real good way not to hurt those fish? Pardon me? You know, I got a real good way 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 them. That's true. That's the best way. Which I've done a lot of.

But then what's the point? Yeah. So do you think that your, how much has your fishing effectiveness changed over the years? Oh, I can't even calculate it. Um, when I first started fishing, that's a long time ago, boys, 68 years. How old are you right now? It's 82.

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 casted the shoreline. That's how we caught our fish. That's what we knew. We were fishing floids, which made shoreline fishing a little more productive. The big open clearwater lakes, you found a shoreline, you catch 300 northerners in a week,

you won't catch any muskies. Been there, done that too. Explain all that again now. So you grew up casting the shoreline. Right. And why would that not be effective now? Well, it's still effective on floyds type reservoirs where there's a lot of wood and hiding places. What's the word you're using? Floyds.

Floyds. Okay. Like rivers dammed up and they call them floyds in Wisconsin. Reservoirs are the more common name. Chester's nodding knowingly over here because he uses the term flowage. That's what that means. That's his favorite lakes, the flowages. Yeah, we were just talking about one of them flowages.

So it's a reservoir. Right. There's a flowage. Same difference. Gotcha. The reason they called them flowages is because, as you know, starting in the 1800s, 1880s, they started logging the whole state of Wisconsin. Yep.

And what was left was a mess. And a lot of that debris was in the watersheds. And when they put a dam in and made a flowage, that's what it looked like. It was flowed full of stuff. Oh, okay. That's why they call them flowages. Floated all that debris up right gotcha in fact it were it was almost uh impossible to run a motorboat wide open up a lot of fairly

new flowage you're just risking death i see yeah 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 along the edge, cast up toward the shoreline, again, again, again, again, again.

And, you know, if you could find an offshore structure in 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. Okay. And then as depth finders came on the rope, no depth finders again. Then you had a secret honey hole. Okay. And then as depth finders came on the scene,

you 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 Floyds that I was fishing, it was fairly shallow, so you could hit the bottom with the oar 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 was like 15 feet, except for a hole by the dam that's 33 feet deep. But the average depth of the whole lake is seven feet.

Okay. So, you know, then from that, you graduated to bigger waters. We went to Canada to catch big muskies. Uh, we used our lake, the first trip up there, we used our lake shore casting and we caught 300 Northern and no muskies. So we, 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 muskie fishermen progress. They learn a little bit at a time. The ones that have a little money and are smart to hire a guide and cut their learning curve in half.

And then, you know, as more and more new equipment comes out, the big thing now is forward-facing sonar it's it's going to kill the muskie 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 60 miles a day and make 35 casts. And every cast was at a fish that you could see on the screen. Yeah. You're talking about like live scope.

Yeah, live scope, forward-facing sonar, same difference. Do you have one of those setups? I do not. And here's the thing. I'm 82 years old. I've got two bad shoulders. This 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 have one of these contraptions. Now, if you look down across from you and down that way, you're going to see some real advocates. You're really outing them. Yeah, you're going to see some real cheaters.

We don't use a musky fish, though. If 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 okay don't you feel that you could have said the same thing about anything monofilament do you mean like depth finders or yeah your depth finder and your your your i'm still using a rope and a rock oh my 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 in 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 what's going to happen. Okay. It's going to, if too many new people get into the game and they're not ethical

and they run around the lake and spot fish and cast to them and catch them there's one bass guy that did a film he caught three over 50 inches in a half a day because he was using he's so good on electronics right he's like i don't see what the big deal is right so but he had no concern in fact, you know, what he was actually doing. But he wasn't throwing them on a stringer. And the thing of it is, we don't know if he knew how to handle them. I mean, he's a bass fisherman. They hold them by the lip, right?

Yeah. Try holding a muskie by the lip. You're going to have a sore thumb. And see what happens. You get tooth thrown 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. They say the same thing about everything. Motion decoys, same thing. That's a hot topic, isn't it, Larry? The thing of it is that is that yes you can control to an extent with size limits and bag limits but since the muskie world is already 99 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 there mortality is the the ultimate goal to eliminate it

so how do you educate 100 000 new muskie fishermen to handle a 50 inch or properly in the first place is first time it flaps its jaws 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 with my kids larry what is the proper way to handle a muskie well the best way is like was mentioned here about dick pearson's 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 personal that seems like the last one you'd want to weigh 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 grin with the tarpon. Cannot. Unless you buy a tag and you want to kill it. Then it's legal. Oh, it's against the law to take a grip with a tarpon? Yeah.

So all that getting in the water with them and taking pictures yeah 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 i'm like so that's tarpon conservation which means it's almost a totally limiting handling mortality unless i want to just buy a tag and bonk a fish, right? And how many are they going to kill doing that? Not that many. Do you routinely see poor handling methods among newer muskie fishermen

and then good handling methods among older muskie fishermen? Some older muskie fishermen that don't catch a lot of muskies don't know how to handle them either. They don't get the practice. I mean, they're not an easy fish to handle. Yeah. Particularly when you're talking 35, 30, 40, 45, 50 pounds. That was a 40-pounder right there.

That's a 40. I'm just holding this up so people can see. You're going to shred your thumb. Yeah. Now, what you have to consider there is even though they're sharp and long, there's a lot of meat on the base of the teeth. So you're not going to see that much when you see the fish. But you see it maybe that much. Yeah, you'll see it, and that'll go through your finger.

In fact, a friend of mine ran a 56-inch tooth all the way out through the thumbnail. Those 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 BB gun wars and this dude named Tristan out at the slabs at Cedar Creek, he caught a BB that went through his finger and out the fingernail. That's excruciating pain back to like though if you are larry gonna catch a muskie and you do want to get a picture with it

um you got to make sure you keep it in the net like with the face up um 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. That's a very common thing. You got to make sure you get that hook off, keep the fish's head in the water. Right. A lot of the musky nets of today have a real deep bag. And like a ranger boat, it's fairly high-sided 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 barbless 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 i used to i don't anymore but uh if you use what we call quick set rigs, I have no problem with it. But problem so far I've seen is some of the guides are not using quick set rigs to set quick. They're destroying the whole thought process of what do you want the muskie to do is grab your sucker. There's two treble hooks on the sucker, and you immediately and you should hook the fish just like if they grabbed one of these lures there whereas the harness rig they kind of have

a little thing or a hook that you can put through the nose of the sucker go through the nostrils to hold it on the rig but IGFA for instance if you use a sucker for muskies they won't accept it. What?

If it's a legal method in Wisconsin, which it is in all of Wisconsin, IGFA wouldn't accept it if you caught a 75-pounder. That's just their rules. Is that because they don't want people to use live bait? They don't want live bait, no. Here's a question about the IGFA. You're familiar with the Boone and crockett club yes okay boone and crockett club has uh different categories so as you'll find oftentimes the biggest specimen known to man

was not killed by a hunter okay the biggest bighorn right the world record the biggest bighorn 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 um is the igfa interested in how big do they get, or are they only looking at fish that conform to their own little rule book? That's pretty much it. IGFA started in 1939. It was pretty much a rich man's game at that point.

Big offshore yachts and money people. Yeah, like billfish and all that got it right and they they were totally saltwater until 1979 i started the freshwater fishing hall of fame world record program in the early 70s and field and stream at that time was the other record keeper in freshwater 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 belong 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 he backed off so they eventually

turned their fresh water program over to IGFA until that time, IGFA had no use for freshwater whatsoever. So somewhere along the late seventies, we decided to try to merge the two programs, IGFA and the hall of fame. So I flew to Fort Lauderdale where they were headquartered at the time. And, we had a meeting with elwood k harry who was the president at the time and they got that big uh it's a big marlin out front right yeah a big silver model i don't remember if they did it in the fort lauderdale they probably do at fort daniel beach where they're at now or in dana beach but anyway um 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 IGFA to allow them to print the records in their publications. And IGFA wouldn't allow it until after they'd published it. Well, that didn't sit well with the founder and the director of the Hall of Fame. So he was smart when he turned over the records he made copies of everything so he just reconstituted the program and back again back again we came with two programs so uh i was a representative for ijfa for 16 years and uh when the muskie war started i got crossways with what's the muskie war Muskie War? The world records, the Muskie War. It started in 92. You have to explain that, but when you're ready. Okay, let's jump horses here for a second.

Let's go back to the 72-pounder and work backwards. Okay. That seems to be a logical way to do it. I want to hear about the muskie war we'll get to that we're gonna get there yeah that's a big thing oh by the way muskies canada they even put release that's the name of their magazine release journal the release journal yeah that's how gung-ho muskie fishermen are for catching man those guys would probably have a shit fit if you went spearfish and muskies, man.

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Welcome to the, to the on X club y'all. Since you 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 people that don't know how 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 to 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. But anyway, the fish pretty much beat themselves up. So if you release them in the water, obviously the only thing you're going to have to do is reach down with the pliers and back the hooks out. Lay a measuring stick alongside them to get an idea of, 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 are ambush predators. They're not. They're cousins. They're 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 they're not going to

be able to deal with this big buildup of lactic acid so it takes them way longer to recover and during that recovery period they're susceptible to predation as well. Um, or in the case of your older fish, they may just not be able to recover from it. Yeah. They, they are terrific speed demons for short distance. They can go 60 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? 60 miles an hour for a short distance. No kidding. Jesus. If you're in a 20-foot boat, they can go from one end of that boat to the other end of the boat before you can blink. That's how fast they are. But they can't keep it up yeah in other words if you if i've got a friend that likes to play them

before before we land them we always have getting on his case saying you're going to get in the snag and lose the fish just so you hurry up and get it so we can net it and let it go because if you if you play them for a half like yours there's stories in the old days fight if there's stories in the old days of an hour fight or a half hour fight or 45 minute fight if anybody takes more than five minutes to land a fish unless it's a really big one they're messing around with it or they don't have heavy enough equipment to handle the fish they shouldn't be fishing for them in the first place now you'll hear when somebody hooks a muskie you know oftentimes keep reeling keep reeling keep reeling you know like a lot of guides you know yeah get the fish to the boat yeah because

if you keep reeling you're keeping tension on the fish yeah the minute you give them a split second 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 yeah when i was working on the tracking study on eagle lake in 86 we we would put them in a in a 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'd been eating. We had one big fish. It was probably a 35-pound fish, and we put a mouth spreader. You know what a mouth spreader is?

Put a mouth spreader in the fish to hold it open so we could put the tube in to flush the stomach. The fish is dead asleep. Just squished that mouth spreader completely closed just that fast, and it's asleep. 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 they're hooked for three, four, five minutes,

and all of a sudden they look at you and they open their 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, it opened its mouth. This is your own little lure, Chester. Yeah.

As soon as it hit the net and opened its mouth, the bait popped out. In the fall, particularly, when I used to do a lot of sucker fishing, they would grab the sucker, and my 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 they were because we didn't want to catch a small one. And a lot of times they get up to where you can see them and 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.

Yep. And he's hungry. He wants that sucker, but he ain't going to let you get a look at him for very long. We've had him drop it and pick it up two, three, four times. Yeah. And sometimes you get them and sometimes you

don't. Tell us about this 72 pounder, the start of the Muskie Wars, right? Actually, this didn't start the Muskie Wars, but it's reignited them a little bit are these the are these is this the crew we 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 this guy 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. It was on the internet. They found out, and he sent me this. I think he sent it to me. Yeah, he sent it to you. And then after I found out about it and put some more about it on the internet then he sent me a copy and then i called him the next day we talked for 40 minutes and okay can we

refresh people's memory we were what started this whole thing of larry being here was showed up i get we gather show up in the mail yeah yeah and you know whatever not that i was like go through mail on my desk, and there's this big thing called the Muskie Manifesto and it's photographs, documentation, all kinds of stuff, and basically it's a story about how some guys got

boned by the IGFA. 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 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's really the meat of the deal. Yeah, that was the meat of the deal. That's what started this whole conversation. And I started talking about my understanding of the muskie community. And how they're touchy fellers there's the picture that that's the picture i know right when it appeared on the internet on a post that i

started let me hold that for you somebody sent it in with the heads cut off of the anglers this is what started this conversation is this guy saying that they had a 72 pounder everybody knows it's a 72 pounder. But they weighed it 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 broke for IGFA. Tell me more. 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 the fish weighed 73 pounds. Yeah.

He said that in the manifesto. Turns out it's even bigger. The length measurement must be done on an IGFA bump board. In other words, 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 fish on the scale showing the weight. Didn't have that. In fact, the guy who wrote the manifesto was one of the five, there were three cousins and two uncles, 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 wrote the manifesto did not see it.

So he's hanging his hat on it that it's the biggest muskie ever caught but he he didn't even see it weighed himself as far as the measurement how did you do some phone calls larry pardon you did some phone calls about this yeah i track anything big you do yeah um the final You do. Yeah. The final fly on the ointment, and IGFA told me personally that had it not been weighed in the boat that there were several other things that they would have pursued before they would ever recognize it. Length measurement, as I told you, has to be done on their bump board. Here's how they did it. On the inside of the gunwale boat, about halfway between the gunwale and the floor,

there was a 50-inch ruler stuck to the boat. Sure. 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 measured the distance past that tape where one of the guys marked the spot and then they measured and they thought it was six and a half inches

well igfa would never accept that if 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 laxool is total catching immediate release keyword immediate and the conservation officers i think are a little bit lenient to let you take a picture uh-huh quick one but had the seal came by while they were monkeying 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 Loxul. But that's what you said it's going to come out of. No, 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 even in the right class of fish?

Compare those two pictures. I think Larry's jealous. Does fish make you jealous Larry? That one don't because I caught it Okay I see what you're saying here So I'm looking at these two fish Pretty close Just going by the

What you see they look like they're pretty close to the same size fish. Because they're both being held up by two people standing side by side. Right. Yeah. I would superficially be like, yeah, those are in the ballpark.

Roughly the same size fish. Okay. My fish was 57 and a quarter inches, which is slightly longer than they claimed for their fish. Okay. We weighed it on a certified scale, state certified scale. It weighed 54 pounds, four and a half ounces.

So you're saying, do I see 20 pounds of blubber on that fish that the other fish doesn't have? Exactly. And 20 pounds is a pile of blubber. 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 60 pounds, let alone 70, including Dick Pearson that was referenced here a while ago when we were talking. It just is, it's not there. It's not there.

And in the manifesto, there's 11 more pictures besides that one and there's several pictures of it in the guy's laps and in no none of those pictures except one does it even have a little bit of belly so there's just no way that fish weighed 18 pounds more than my fish weight yeah even had Even if it had a sucker in it. Yeah. I mean. A couple more pounds. It would have had more than a, it would have had to have a 10 pound white fish or something

in it to, to get close to 70 pounds. Some lead weights. Most people, it sounds like most people out there fishing, and maybe I'm wrong about this. I like to fish, but not 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 that I've- Well, 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 to shore and get out. That's not immediate release. But I ain't fishing like Sewell either. I'm on the St. Lawrence River.

Oh. Ah. This is, and more brain busters? Here's the thing. There might be a way you could do it on like Sewell if they relax that rule a little bit and they're, they're working on it. Yeah, I can imagine. If you pulled the boat to shore, if you had a cradle, you know what a cradle is?

Yeah, I do, yeah. Instead of a dip net. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

You should be able to get it above the water if you're on solid ground well it's obviously feasible because i mean they're doing it on they'll do it on like great white sharks are an esa species and they'll get weights off great whites and cradles so i mean there's a way to do it right if you got the right expertise right so that's the only way that they could have come even close to complying with IGFA 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 a world record muskie or if you're fishing where the potential exists, whichever place that's got muskies, it's igfa whether it's a fishing hall of fame or whether it's the modern day muskie world record program that i've started and have all 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 Why is that? Because here's the thing. And if you read my book, you'll find what happened in past history.

Different wet sand put in fish, Coke bottles full of sand in fish to add weight. 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 the summit contents we'll check it for water we'll check it for bait fish we'll check it for sand and rocks bait fish is fine yeah if they weren't stuffed in there by the angler then that's that's a that's going to be a tough call if it ever happens but depending on the size of the forage you should be able to tell whether the muskie

grabbed the fish or whether it didn't. Something fishy is going on. Yeah. You like that, Cal? And people criticize some for saying, you know, we have to kill the fish. Yeah. But that's one fish out of a zillion. Yeah, how often is that going to happen?

The last big muskie caught was. Well, plus if you educate your anglers and say, you're going to kill this fish because you're positive it's a new record. Well, and if you're smart, you've got to scale on the boat to find out before you kill it. Oh, yeah, there you go. And I've got some... I got what you're saying. So this should be like a once in a

generation activity. Right. I mean, I've got some pictures here of, I won't dig them out but uh there's been a couple really big fish caught out of the St Lawrence River in the last couple years and they had scales on the boat they had lots of witnesses yes they waited on the boat but they weren't going for a record anyway so they just wanted to know how big it was it was almost 60 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 oh quite a few i mean i 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 So at points you've had a day job. Yeah. What line of work for you? For instance, our modern day muskie world record is 58 pounds. That's the modern record. Okay.

It was caught in Michigan. It was put in the freezer. What river? It was in the Bel Air chain, the Torch River chain. Oh, yep. Okay. And he took it to a taxidermist. One of our you took it to a taxidermist one of our committee members went to the taxidermist remeasured the fish reweighed the fish and then it was stayed

in the freezer for four months and they shipped it to minnesota to have a replica made a mold for a replica and so i made arrangements to be there when they got the fish. They thawed the fish out. I was there when it was opened. I reweighed it first to make sure it weighed close to what it was claimed to be, and 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 13 inch small mouth. The head almost completely gone and absolutely no weight there. He ate a keeper small mouth. And 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 uh october so it was it was not starting real early probably into december before they really start building up eggs and do it through the winter so you got to personally handle the world record yes 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 than than uh you know just a just a modern day record but we've also when you invest like i would say you investigated this fish right the musky manifesto my investigation the world records took up the whole book. That's all just world records right there. And that whole thing is about

the past world records. A compendium of musky angling history. Muskellunge world records, the history, the truth. The truth. 1877 to 2006. 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 there all the time, yeah. But does it get adversarial? And that book's 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, but it didn't. With this kid, were you guys getting on each other's nerves? No, we 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. And they all thought they had a world record.

From what I understand, what I was told, and not from this kid, but from the resort people, or people associated with the resort people, the scale they used was a $20 Amazon scale. It 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 72 pounds. I mean, he lifted weights a little bit, but try it sometime. It's not easy to lift 40 pounds, let alone 70. So whether the scale jiggled or whether the boat rocked who knows but nobody believes it weighed 72 pounds if they want to believe it that's fine more power to them and that's if that's what they

want that to be their family goal go for it but i'm not buying it ain't going in the book i probably won't do any more revisions. I'm getting too old. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the great white north can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free

three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay, tell me about why did the Muskie War start the year I finished high school? And is there a correlation? Never thought about that. Why did the Muskie War start the year I finished high school? And is there a correlation?

Never thought about that. Okay, in 1991. Oh, sorry, I finished 92. John Detloff, who's an amateur historian in my hometown, where I live now, Hayward, Wisconsin. A Muskie historian or a historian historian? Pretty much, he's a historian, but heavy into muskie. Okay. So he decided that he was going to investigate it.

And so he used his amateur photo analysis to try to debunk Arthur Lawton's 69-pound, 15-ounce muskie from the St. Louis River. 69-pound? 69-15 from St lauren trevor 1957 the the thing of it is it could have all stopped right there had 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 pictures that Field and Stream published were the actual pictures of the fish. IGFA is a reason for setting the record aside, and they never did do a complete disqualification. It's still in set-aside status. But at that time in

57, Field and 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 them in 2007 but they still rejected it but that was all bologna because when the world record musky alliance challenged cal johnson's uh 1957 or 1949 67 pounder um lost my chain of thought you were talking about the you're talking about the amateur historian okay we're we're off of him for a minute yep the wrma which is a world record muskie alliance they were trying to prove which world record muskies were indeed legitimate yeah

which of these guys actually had it right and so they had a professional photogrammetrist. And now I analyze the photographs. And the same thing they did for Spray's fish, which was 69-11, the one that Lawton beat. And when they denied the WRMA's protest and also Louis Spray's protest for the hall. 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 25% smaller than what they claimed by photo analysis

of both the fresh fish and the mount after it was mounted. Got it. If you overlay the outline of both the mounted fish and the fresh fish, the same thing they did with spray's fish. One is way shorter than the other one. Ten inches in spray's case 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 moccasin bar and show you johnson's mountain i'll show you exactly how

they did it and i've i've had quite a few beers over there and What bar? And what bar? Moxon Bar. Oh, Moxon. Hanging the Moxon Bar in a glass case. Still there now. Still there now. And what's it say underneath it?

Cal Johnson's world record muskie because they didn't want to claim world record muskie because supposedly Spray's Face beat it, but Spray's Face was a lie anyway,

so. But anyway, that's. It was a lie or a mistake? No his face was a lie anyway. So anyway, that's, that's. It was a lie or a mistake? No, it was a lie. Louis the liar, I call him. Oh. Does he have a history of lying?

Gloves are off. It started in 1939. Is he still alive? Everything was pretty kosher up till 1939. Lake of the Woods in 1929, 1931, 1932 produced world record muskies. The biggest one of all of them was 58 pounds and four ounces. That was 1932.

And this is like the heyday. Right. The heyday of Lake of the Woods. Yeah. But it still, to this day, never produced a 60 pound fish. Okay. So in 1939, there was a gentleman named

Percy Haver 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, Louis 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 muskets 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 60-pound, 8-ounce legitimate fish. Legit. Legit. In fact, John Deloff has not challenged that fish to this day. So anyway, that was 1939. 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 was 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? 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, probably a couple, but yeah. I mean. When he got the first one, he put it on ice in his bar, had everybody write in a

book what they guessed that it weighed before he ever told it, excuse me, anybody how much it weighed. And then in 1940, he decided to do it again but hayward already beat him with a bigger one in 1940 so this is two years in a row hayward'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 they still he still claimed on his even on his tombstone today, here lies the remains of Louis Spray, three world record

muskies in his day. So he had the last. That's on his tombstone? That's on his tombstone in the Hayward, Wisconsin graveyard. Is that a picture in your book? I don't have a picture of the tombstone, but it's, it's in.

Chester's going to get one. It's, it's in a book someplace. So when it was all said and done, that's what he wanted on there. Right. Not like loving father. Right. Right. Yeah.

So. Three time. And that was his supposed second world record, but it wasn't. And then that same year, another Eagle Lake fish, big fish was caught 61 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 this two two 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 and kind of got out of the muskie game. In 1947, a 64 and a half pound fish was caught in Vilas County, Wisconsin.

And of course, right away the rumors started and the game warden said he had it in a pen fattening it up. And, you know, the usual rumors. Throwing kittens in a little baby pool. Yeah, yeah, I love it. So, Detloff, he was trying to disprove every big muskie that was caught, except those were caught in Hayward with the exception of the Eagle Lake fish, and I don't know why he skipped those two. So anyway, he tried to discredit the Hanzer

fish and, and he never did dispute the fact that it was 58 inches long. But when the picture was taken of Hanzer holding the fish, he had already gutted the fish and taken 12 pounds of spawn out of it. So it looked like it's, you know, a tube that was 58 inches long and couldn't have possibly weighed 64 and a half pounds, but he had certified scale.

He had all the affidavits necessary and everything. So that kind of died down. Then in 49. Can I tell you something? I signed up for a turkey derby one time in uh elroy wisconsin at the bar and i gutted my turkey and brought it down there and uh everybody had a big laugh about how i gutted it well the next day we stopped back down there and we come in they They're still in there. He gutted it.

He gutted it. What, did it go by weight? What kind of idiot? Cost yourself there, didn't you? So anyway, 1949, Cal Johnson caught a supposed 67 1⁄2 pounder. Nice fish. I'd like you to do a little photo analysis if you would. Okay. There's three pictures of his supposed 67 and a half pounder

and one picture of a 44 pounder. And they don't look much different. Well, bottom right is a real stud. Well, I think before we would start this, don't you think we would say, Mr. Rinella, 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? Just eyeballing. I have caught a tiger muskie.

Wow. And many, many, many 24, 22 inch Northerns. Yeah. And, uh, these are all whoppers. Well, one of the things that was. But I got to say this in all seriousness, I'm not a, as you know, not, not a seasoned muskie fisherman i mean maybe you can help explain it but come on how much can you how what can you tell from any of these photos

not a lot actually unless they're done professionally by a photogrammetrist but the thing that that stuck me was i bought this magazine at a flea market and it was written a cal johnson article written a year before he got his record. Okay. Out of the same lake where he supposedly got his record. And that's the picture right there. And strangely enough, a year later, he catches a fish that looks a lot like that fish. And claims it to weigh 67 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 may not be that fish it may be that fish i don't know i don't really care but here's how lax record keeping was even then 1949 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 to that name in all kinds of different ways. So it was affiliated with the magazine back then.

So, letter to Cal Johnson. We recently received a clipping covering your 67 and a half pound musklin'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 lax world record certification was in those days. Yeah. So. When you go into looking at a fish, when you go into investigating a fish, are you hoping, and you got to be honest, okay? 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, 1981, 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 would have jumped all over it. But my goal was to record history.

That was 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 1981. In 1997, 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 2007 and uh

that's a very very hard read volume one because it gets so much into depth and how we determine this and how we determine that and what have you but uh When Deloff first made his proposal to get Lawton's Fish disqualified, I was working a lot of hours, 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. 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 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 when the WRMA protested the spray fish, the 6911 fish that replaced the 1915 Lawton fish. At that time, I was on the hall board. I was the world record advisor. And WRA made the protest. It was a 90-some page, this big black notebook here, of all the things that they found that Louie's a no-good son of a bitch. A 90-page takedown. Right.

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 Detloff, who at the time was the director of the hall of fame, or 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. Yeah. In fact, he allowed me 15 minutes to make a presentation to the board and that was it.

And they had blowups of the affidavits as big as that plain picture behind you there. And so one of the board members asked me, he says, how can you contest these affidavits? I said, ask that gentleman there because Lawton had five legitimate affidavits? I said, ask that gentleman there, because Lawton had five legitimate affidavits to the weight of his fish. And when Detloff did his protest, and they disqualified it, four of those witnesses came forward and re-signed another affidavit that the fish was legitimate, and he found three new witnesses. Three new witnesses were found. Two of them made affidavits, and one of them was a next-door neighbor to Lawton's, and he verified. Detloff made up his own affidavit 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 49 pounds. And the next weekend's when he got the 69-15. And he was witness to both of them. Where Detloff was trying to say that because the photographs that appeared in Field and Stream were of the 49-pounder, that that's the one Lawton was claiming to be the 69-pounder. And so then IGFA, after the WRMA protest, said that you can't tell from a two-dimensional photograph the weight of a fish,

but my comeback to them was, but you can tell if it was phonied up enough because the photogrammetry proves that it was 25% smaller than it actually claimed to be. And plus, you've got the witnesses, the weight witnesses. He said, the current president of the IGFA said that IGFA recognizes all tackle records by scale weight only, period. Well, we had, what, 10 affidavits or so of Lawton's fish, and they won't reinstate it? I want to know why.

They won't answer me. But 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. 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 friendships over this whole thing. 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 going to go by scale weight, certified scale weight. Well, Lawton had all that, so he should have never been disqualified in the first place. Oh yeah, I've lost a lot of friends over it.

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 trip so he could stay there and help build their bullshit case against the WRMA protest. When was that? That was in 2006. Have you ever seen guys come to blows over muskies? 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 in the muskie world too. I mean, the serious, I know all the top names in the game. Yeah. Fished with a lot of them, friends with a lot of them. My personal guide on the St. Lawrence river is probably the best on the planet. I'm biased a little bit, but he's caught over 50, 50 pounders. You know, it's nobody in history. I mean, very few muskrat fishermen ever catch a

30 pounder, let alone a 50 pounder. He's caught two 58 and a half pounders. His clients have caught them, but he was the guy, I mean, in my mind, that fish that I showed you that I caught, it was his fish. He was, he put us on the fish. I just reeled it in. What, but what do you think about, like,

what do you think about a what do you think about a world a subset a fishing hunting subset whatever that gets to where um everything you know 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 uh they must have been lying that's jealousy 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 will make fun or deny anything yeah but for the most part like this fish if let's say it did weigh 72 pounds it's a hell of a big fish then 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 observer number five, that anybody in the musky world that I know, if they catch a world record, they're going to 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 on musky 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 observer number five he said that it's obviously one of our our inner circle but we don't know who it was it It wasn't one of the five. So that's, that's, that's one thing that had thrown me was why we weren't hearing from them back.

Like we show you a picture and won't tell you nothing else. And I, you know, I emailed this guy private email a couple of times and never got any response because he wasn't part of the group, he didn't know anything. Was there a time when you uh how bad did you want to be a world record holder oh since 1957 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 to fish where they are and i I always tell people, if you want to catch a big muskie, you've got to go where big muskies live.

Amen. And if you don't, your odds are zero. And that's one of the things about, you know, we promote catch and release for every body of water because all of them can be hurt with too much pressure and too much harvest. Yeah.

As I've proven, I think, based on mortality and the more newer newcomers that come to the game and don't know how to handle these fish, it's going to 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 at the in the game and they don't know how to handle them

they're going to kill everything to catch and we'll be back to the mid mid 1950s and and 100 000 fish go to the grave every year you know what this guy's actual name is musky chet musky chet this guy's coming hot on your hot on your heels dude that's all right i welcome in fact i've been trying to find somebody to take over for me because i'm not going to live forever there you go jester there we go i'll be the next musky you got a spare room unfortunately no but i i need somebody to move in for a while hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, On X is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast now you guys in the great white north can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service

that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. The problem I've got, and I was talking to... Corinne. Corinne at lunch today. I said, if you were to saw the top of my head off... Gotcha. There'd be a bunch of little muskies

swim around reminds me of the brain worms if it wasn't muskies what would what do you think it would have been because you know what ducks oh you already know oh i was a big time duck hunter for a long time yeah yeah yeah do you feel like you got a little bit of a um do you do you feel like you got like some like ocd or like uh or like uh like do you feel that if it wasn't 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 son of a bitch would have 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 wine glasses musky beer cans you name it musky i got it it's just do you feel like um are you glad about it

i i mean do you are you ever afraid you'd someday be like god damn it really muskies no my whole life no i i wouldn't trade 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 forward-facing sonar. If the guys use it ethically, I've 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. Barotrauma. Is that the same with northerns? Yeah, the big northerns. Small northerns stay shallow. Yeah. So if in the summertime when the water surface temperature 75 78 even 80 degrees and you're pulling a fish out of 40 feet of water that's probably 68 degrees down there

you're gonna kill that fish pretty much and that's where the ethics come in yeah like you're gonna use this technology they're gonna handle more fish they're gonna be catching more fish in the wrong places they're gonna be maybe not so educated on how to deal with them once they do catch them right and it's just each fish is going to be more exposed to more a higher likelihood of getting handled you're in this chester yeah so i've got this is like i said this topic is uh opening up a can of worms um there are some sport face sonars there there's absolutely no doubt that it helps you catch fish like oh absolutely there's that's panfish guides are loving it yeah that's that's no copies are going to be the first one to suffer the the things though that this is has to be very

self-governing which is very hard to. Exactly. If people are just catching fish and not handling them 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 properly. Like if you are fishing, for example, on a break line, right, that is in 10 feet of water, but it's close to 40 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 80 degrees, and all of a sudden you see a muskie shoot up out of that 40 feet of water into the 10 feet of water, and you catch him. 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 sympathetic to what you're saying right now, is that it educates. And all this technology, not all, but much of the technology educates and all this technology not all but much of the technology educates we used like at our area where we are in southeast Alaska if you look I'm not kidding if you'd have come to me ten years ago not even ten years ago eight years ago seven years ago you'd have come to me, I would have said, for some weird reason, we don't have Lingcod where we're at.

I would have said that up until a very 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, there's Lingcod all over the place. I just never knew, I never understood the contours we

used to fish off marine charts with like so like handfuls of uh fathom readings on marine chart paper marine charts once i knew like oh my god that's like that down there and there's specific ridge lines 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 lingcod. I'll tell you another thing. We've cleaned a lot of lingcod off a lot of hilltops.

It's like they go, you know, so the new, all the knowledge and information is great. It's beautiful. But you can hurt a fishery. Well, we never scratched those fish. We never ever scratched those fish. But you could. I know where they're at now. Yeah.

I know the first thing I'm going to do. Coming into ethics as far as your hunting when you fly into to go hunting in alaska and canada you can't hunt the same day right correct that's that's ethics that's the same thing i'd look at with forward-facing sonar if you're going to run ethics i i would argue ethics would be that you could but choose not to yeah but the law isn't the law well the law is the law right the law is but it's the law for a reason yeah we're getting a little bit chicken or 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 right like we don't murder is not illegal because uh you know you create a lot of uh it's not like yeah you create a lot of paperwork and big messes it's like illegal because we've ethically decided that fratricide is bad yeah you're right like a lot of a lot of law springs from ethics right a lot of method to take law and bag limits and all that also spring from how would you put it uh resource management. There's one Canadian bolly that has been on the forums that, where he is, he's in Manitoba.

They have a none over rule. Red River big and catfish. Yep. Well, you can keep them up to a certain size, but you can't keep any over that size because it's your breeders. Yep. And that's what he'd like to see happen to muskies,

which would eliminate any possible future world record, obviously. Yeah, I see what you're saying. But 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 size limits.

You control by bag limits. One of the lakes in Hayward, 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 slaughtering them. They can't take that kind of pressure. Oh, they couldn't settle on something like a little more compromising yeah five five 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 30 fish yeah might as well sell the bucket scaler now. What lake was that? It's Moose Lake. Okay. It's east of Hayward, 25 miles. Got it. If you find the panfish, sometimes you find the muskies, though.

Yep. Chester, do you have aspirations of being a world record holder? I mean, if I got a big fish, like, for instance, Cal and I one time were out on a lake a couple years ago around here. We caught a giant fish. We were not prepared.

Do I really care that I would, you know, it probably wasn't. I don't think. I think it was though, but go ahead. Could have like a state record. I don't necessarily think I'd care about having my name number one, but it'd just be nice to kind of know in my heart how big that fish was, you know? So like next time I'm out in Wisconsin, you know, on a big fish water, 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. If they said why, I'd be like, I'm not sure, but I know that I do.

Catching big fish is great. It's just a normal progression of the mind. You want more, more, more, better, better, better, bigger, bigger, bigger. Yeah. This is pretty funny. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and he was talking about how like trophy elk 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 $25,000 to go on this super exclusive big time elk 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, uh, no, I guess I haven't. I'm not, I'm not following what he's saying. He's like, he's like, um, big time hunts don't propagate hunting. Oh. Because it's like, he's like, that 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 I entirely agree. I know, I know. But I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. I could see a certain thing, I could see something like that happen to me and right away in my head being like, I'm not bringing all my freaking kids right i'm there to get something how much time are we at we're at

time to wrap it up time i wanted to talk go ahead hitler larry about fishing more actually fishing muskies go ahead yeah give them 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 10,000 casts, you know, that's what everyone calls the muskie. Yeah, we could talk about fishing for days. Have you calculated it out, how many casts? It's not quite that many. I mean, that would be one cast every minute for roughly seven days straight. And that was born out of the fact that in the mid-1900s,

when they were killing 100,000 muskies a year, it probably took that many. But today, if you take more than 1, thousand casts, you're in the wrong spot. You're not doing something right. In fact. If you had to catch a big muskie, are you throwing baits or are you 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 on yeast, we fished five days. In July, we were there for five days. We'd catch 24 fish. Muskies. Three of us, yeah. And six of those would be 50 inches. Man.

Go back in August for another five days. Like freezer fillers. And catch 40 in five days and six of them over 50 inches. Hotter water, the fish are more active, metabolism's 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 28 years. So, in fact, more than that but uh they're getting they're getting a little educated they're harder to harder to catch now but we still um 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 50 inchinch fish or bigger, up to 57, 58.

My buddy who was nine weeks in a coma with COVID got out of COVID, got a little bit healthy. That's when the Canadian border was closed. We got 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 sunday two days later you got a 58 and a half incher with a 14 inch head imagine this a 14 inch 14 and a half inch head it's just incredible it's

incredible well two 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 muskie guys like their baits. Here's the thing that drives me crazy being an author. These guys that are nutcases would rather spend $100 on their 700th muskie lure than to spend $35 for a book that explains the history of their sport

it makes me crazy another question what what boat you fishing out of ranger normally nice um you know when you're talking about the fish of 10 000 casts yeah and you calculate it out how long you have to do that yeah kind of that one of the highlights of my dad's life is a guy wrote an article about his still hunting method, and he 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 40 yards from his truck at the end of the day or something like that. Highlight of his life. Got it published. That is hilarious.

Yeah. Out of the couple hundred lures that you have, Larry, the 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 and one surface bait. Oh, I like it.

I got a question for you. You think Chester's an idiot for using those lures? Those are two of the deadliest lures on the planet. Good for you, Chester. Good job, man. Yeah, this thing is catching so many giant fish. The only problem I've 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. No, so you want to be on your game. Their lips hit it, and they think it's real. So you've got to have a tool that'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? I want to say, I can't quite remember. I'd say 18 bucks.

It was 20. Oh, that's not bad. 18 to 25. You pass that other lure down? Yeah. That's a suick. This is a suick. It was developed in the 30s by a guy named Frank Suick.

He caught a muskie a day for 30 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 the uh they wanted him to stop because he was going to clean the lake up yeah because you kept every one of them no that was in the keep what what years did your great your grandfather fish the man so he died well I get bear with me minute he died and around 84 at 80 okay help me out here early 19 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 50s and 60s yeah he's a big muskie fisherman everybody kept him and then a hundred thousand

a year died and the dnr tried like hell to make enough babies just to replace them and uh fishing was tough in those days yeah he was from a farm in what is now Naperville, Illinois, which you'd never guess you could be from a farm there. Yeah. There's orchards and stuff. Right. He was from a farm there, and when they went on vacations, they would go up into Wisconsin to fish muskies.

And that was what he did. I mean, Wisconsin was the muskie mecca of North America for a long time. Actually, formal muskie fishing started on the St. Lawrence River in the 1880s 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 stock the hell out of it. They they stock like 13 000 a year in there too yeah you want to know something that chaps my ass larry what's that in wisconsin wet butt

in wisconsin they've been trying to push to get pike spearing through the ice and you know who blocks it? The muskie community. The muskie community feels like an American angler can't distinguish between a northern and a muskie. So the minute you let them spear pike through the ice, they're going to start killing muskies. A friend of mine pointed 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 and on and on but you can't tell but you can't count on to tell a muskie from a pike what do you think about that uh it's possible would you support i wouldn't support it do you stand strong with pike spears i stand against any spearing To be honest with you What about sturgeon spears? Now I understand Like in Michigan

You can still spear muskies in Michigan You can? 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 spearing? I don't like any through the ice catching either.

In fact, to give you an example, where I fish on the St. Lawrence River until this year, the season for muskies didn't close until March 31st. Well, from sometimes mid-December, at least late December, to the end of March, it's froze up. So 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 female. But the reason that they're cutting it back to december 19th will be the date next year is because in the last few years they've been killing so many really big muskies through the

ice ice fishing oh and like last year calling through the ice no i've only tried once but i'm not a nice fisherman last year it stayed uh lake stayed, so guys were fishing open water into December. It opened up early this year, too. It's crazy. One last question. How big are you on following moon phases in muskie fishing? You know, I kept track of that for years, and I tried to be faithful to them, and I found I catch just as many in between slimmer 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'll catch big fish and it's 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 uh or like my opinion is that because people believe that that's when they're fishing yeah they're not out trying the off periods they're not off on the out there on the off hours but when it's moon up time or moon set time they're out there yeah it's like we're getting them on chartreuse yeah what have you been using chartreuse

for a long time black bucktail with a silver spinner blade that was there probably up until say 1970 there was probably more muskies caught on that one color combination bucktail than all the other musky baits put together that's just because that's what everybody was throwing yeah well guess what uh i got another one for you do you get excited about catching a tiger muskie you know i for years said i'll kill and mount the first tiger muskie i 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 muskie but it's on my wall but i i love tigers in In fact, almost more than muskies. No way! What's that? Oh yeah, I love tigers. Did you fry it up? Um, yeah.

But I've caught bigger ones since then and I put them back. Alright, Larry, thanks for coming on, man. I love it. I sure hope people buy your book. Well, I don't care if they do or they don't. If they don't want to know what's going on, screw them. It's called Look a Gift Horse in't. If they don't want to know what's going on, ruin it. 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 ever wanted to know about past world record muskies. Larry, why is the asterisk in the title? 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 muskellunge world records history the truth there's the key word right there circa 19 1877 to 2006 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 Ramsel. 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 or scientific journals and stuff.

This one at the bottom says, who's that by? Me. My best work yet. Larry, I'm going to put an asterisk next to this and there's going to be two asterisks next to your name and you're going to go down to that second asterisk

and it's going to say, a man obsessed. Pretty much. Yeah. Larry Ramsey. That's great. Yeah, man. Pretty much. Have your girlfriend give me a ring next Memorial, man. We're going to mop up on Spawn and Bluegills. Okay.

It's a hot, I know about a hot bobber bite. Oh, she'd love that. You know, we just hit it pretty good. She has boner musky lour, but 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. Okay, thank you. And if I catch a world record, Mosky, while you're still on Earth,

I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. Or call me before you speak. Thank you very much, Larry. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Larry. Thanks, Larry. I love fishing lures. I love to cast them while I'm drinking a course.

Or while on the rocks I'm drinking a doors. Clever little mechanical works of art. I love fishing lures got a whole tackle box of them wouldn't want any fewer I bet I'm a better fisherman than you are

when I'm at the spawning good store I love loading up my cart some are striped some are polka of loading up my cart. Some are striped, some are polka dotted. Big treble hooks, sometimes your line gets knotted.

Some dive deep, some skitter on top of the water. Look at that big bass, I'm glad that I caught her. Some are one piece, some are articulated piece Some are articulated Some are simple Some are complicated Some of them spin

Some of them rattle All kind of exotic colors As your boat you paddle I love fishing lures Without them in my life I would be poor Some are so effective I think I could catch fish in a sewer Lots of well-designed little parts Oh, I love fishing lures I'm thinking of joining that professional bass fishing tour

Some are hundred-year-old classics, others are newer I love the way they dive and dart. Some are clonplated. Others are spotted. You think I'm missing a lure. I've probably got it. Some go back and forth like a teeter-totter.

My dog brings me good luck. I'm glad I brought her. Some are pretty light, others aren't weighted. I want to keep casting fishing lures unabated. Fish are lurking in the shadows. Got to lure them out before my mind gets at home guitar solo I love fishing lures. Mmm. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

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