6 Guide Tips For More Muskies

How many of these six self-help tips do you practice in your quest for muskies?

- Jeff Hanson

On the water every day as a full-time guide, i fish with a lot of people and see a lot of different ways to fish for muskies. i’m often asked by my clients for tips to help them catch more.

With that in mind, here are six ways anyone can improve their musky catch rate.

1. Weeds On The Bait 

It is amazing how big of a clump of weeds you can have on a lure and a musky will still eat it. i have watched a lot of people not figure-8 their lure because they spotted a small weed clinging to it. muskies have no idea the debris is a weed — to them, if it’s in the water and moving, it’s food. Personally, i have caught muskies with very large chunks of weeds on them, especially with Bulldawgs, Suicks and Big Joes being ripped through the weeds. 

My first 50-incher drove this point home to me years ago. i was on vacation and fishing Ontario’s Eagle Lake,and we planned to fish a spot where we’d seen a big musky five times that day. We set up on the spot, and i cast a magnum Hawg Wobbler to the small patch of weeds the musky was using, but my bait landed too far in the weeds. The result was a lure so fouled with weeds it was barely wiggling, but i maintained a normal retrieve, silently beating myself up for the errant cast. as i took the lure into a big figure-8, the musky inhaled it, weeds and all. The fish stretched the tape to 52 1 ⁄2 inches. 

Muskies will eat baits with weeds even on pressured water. Last season, my biggest Madison chain fish ate a magnum Bulldawg that was three-fourths covered by weeds.