Top-water Bulge

The clock is ticking and summer is quickly transitioning to fall.  My near-term schedule is filling to capacity, and my longer-term horizon includes swim season finals, lots of wind, Black Friday, holidays and likely holiday travel.  It’s been too long since I’ve last touched a muskie, and so it was a no-brainer for me to take a recent Friday off work, squeeze in a trip and give Thornapple Lake a try.

West Michigan doesn’t have a whole lot of choices for muskies, but Thornapple is probably the most well-known.  It serves as the brood-stock lake for the MDNR muskie program, and it has a 50-inch possession limit.  It is managed for, and is known to produce, big fish.  It has lots of structure, cover, nooks and crannies, and it is famous for shallow fish.  It’s potentially an interesting place to fish.

But Thornapple’s also three times farther away than other choices, and (in my opinion) suffers from overdevelopment, weeds and water clarity/quality issues.  In my previous visit to the lake (Summer of 2013), it provided a less-than-satisfactory experience.  It was simply too crowded, busy, hot and buggy, with too many boats, and an astronomical amount of smoke from the various encampments and cottages around the lake.  There was nothing relaxing about that trip, and I came home skunked.

I hopefully anticipated a different experience on a post-Labor Day weekday, and Murray Lake hasn’t exactly been overly generous this season.  So I was fairly optimistic as I drove to the lake.  With the entire day ahead of me, I wasn’t exactly in a hurry.  And yet I still felt like I was a little bit late as I launched Numenon at about 7:30 AM.  Still, I was first to the ramp, and there was only one other boat out (as far as I could tell.)  Amazingly, we both seemed to be going to the same point, and so I deferred, and approached my second choice for a starting point; a current-swept shoreline at the head of the lake.

What a beautiful morning!

It was a beautiful morning!  I had still waters, low light, an undeveloped shoreline and various waterfowl to observe.  I also had my favorite muskie top-water lure, a hypnotizing black Pacemaker, clipped on.  On perhaps my tenth or fifteenth cast, I thought I observed a bulging wake appear behind my lure.  This wake stayed so precisely the same distance behind the lure during the retrieve that I started to question whether it was, indeed, a fish tracking my bait.  As the Pacemaker approached the boat, it was running out of real estate; something had to give.  Just as I entered my Figure 8, the fish clearly materialized a couple of inches behind the bait; she was a beautifully large muskellunge.  And just as quickly, she exploded away and was simply gone.

This day's "hot" set-up.

Nothing worth mentioning happened for the rest of the fishing day.

So I was close; but once again I failed to seal the deal.  Who knows what turned her off; too aggressive of an entry into the 8?  Noise from the trolling motor?  A ping from the sonar?  A glint of sunlight off my glasses?  While I postulated that slowing my retrieve would have force-fed her, further discussions with my muskie mentors indicated that it would be better to speed up; to utilize a large oval instead of the 8; and to keep the lure underwater during the turns.  Oh well, maybe I’m now better prepared for my next opportunity.  In the meantime I’ll take my satisfaction in simply having noticed her, catching a glimpse of her, and having experienced the impressive push of water as she bolted.  These are inspiring fish.