To Catch a Predator

Image by Mark Sides

There are a lot of things in this world that don’t make sense, yet somehow work anyway—like the placebo effect, cold fusion, or how a cold beer is refreshing after a long day on the water while still managing to dehydrate you. But perhaps the biggest mystery of them all is why we try to catch pike and musky on a fly rod.

It just doesn’t make sense. Fly fishing was created as a delicate and graceful art that allowed anglers to drift tiny flies for finicky trout. Now, we use it to pursue something as indelicate and utterly violent as a member of the Esox genus, using flies as big as the trout we normally catch. The art and the fish exist in pure contrast, yet it’s somehow one of the most addicting things you can do in the fly fishing world.

A Crazy Addiction

Despite its absurdity, I find myself embarking on this adventure every year to try and land one of these voracious super predators on a fly rod. I don’t understand how this strange sickness came into existence or how it infected me. I only know that if I don’t spend a week or two casting a 10-weight and a tube sock-sized fly until my shoulder feels like it’s filled with broken glass, I start to feel funny.

It begins at night with fevered dreams of unseen shadows cruising on the edges of my subconscious, waiting to dash snarling into the light. During the day, I shake, sweat, and itch, scratching in weirder places than usual. Sometimes, I even start mindlessly tossing clumps of bucktail and Christmas tinsel through the air. When these horrible symptoms occur, I drop whatever small stream, dry fly, trout-sipping nonsense I’ve been doing and head to the closest Northwoods lake, or else risk slipping into madness.

That’s the thing about pike and musky fly fishing—it’s lunacy. Everything about it seems touched with crazy, starting with the time spent on the water. You fish from dawn to dusk, or in pike and muskie angler terms, “can see your fly” to “can’t see your fly.” It’s a marathon of calorie-burning casting that often doesn’t result in a hook-up. Yet you put yourself through it day after day. It’s visual, edge-of-your-seat fishing, where every fiber of your being hums with the anticipation of a strike that may never come.

Ghosts Of The Deep

When a fish does arrive, it’s usually out of nowhere. You’ll be stripping away, bringing the fly back for the 10,000th cast while contemplating naming the blisters on your fingers—when you see the shadow. It materializes from the depths behind your fly, cruising with pure malevolence like some vaguely intelligent torpedo. That anticipation you’ve felt all day rises in a grand crescendo that beats in the hollow parts of your skull. Then most of the time, just when you think everything is going to come to a head and the fish will take your fly, leading you into primal angling combat—it disappears. You can cast again and figure eight with the rod-tip all you want, but usually your chance has passed.

That’s the worst thing about pike and musky. For all their duck-eating, muskrat-eviscerating, big-fish-chomping ferocity, they’re more finicky than an old brown trout in a clear spring creek when it comes to flies. Most of the time they leave you shaken, disappointed, and questioning why anyone would do this. Yet there are those rare occasions when it all comes together. In those moments when I’m triumphantly holding a wriggling, snapping beast and marveling at their magnificence, I no longer question my motives.

Behind the Madness

I think we chase pike and musky with fly rods precisely because it makes no sense. In the fly fishing world where trout is king and delicate presentations are standard, pike and musky offer a stark contrast. Fly fishing for trout comes with an almost poetic reverence, rooted in centuries of sophisticated British Isles tradition where the study of insects and microcurrents were a requirement. That aristocratic imagery springs to mind whenever anglers discuss trout and fly fishing.

But pike and musky are fish that appeal to the bearded, beer-gutted clay of America. These fish are big, bad, and out there looking for a kill. Chasing them with a fly rod is akin to hunting a grizzly bear with a bow and arrow, and success brings a unique pride and prestige. Esox anglers are the ones who wear their sore shoulders and torn, bleeding fingers as badges of honor rather than punishments. When you’re that kind of person, you don’t worry about how crazy or irrational fly fishing for muskie and pike seems to the rest of the world, because in the end it only has to make sense to you.