Champlain, New York

Finally had some time to spend at the river. It did not disappoint 😎

Went out musky fishing for the third time this year, and you guessed it, no musky. I did however land this very nice pike, my guess is about 32", on a mepps marabu musky killer. I thought i had finally done it until i got her in the net. I caught her about 5 casts into the day, and she was the only action over 6 hours. Towards the end of the day, I saw a very large musky over 40" breach the surface for a split second, and although I casted by it, I didnt see it again. Might try here a fourth time on Sunday, although there was a ridiculous amount of people out on the lake fishing today, so I don't even want to think about what Sunday would look like.

Biggin’ on the Ned rig

Nice size football to add to the bag 😎

Today I tried following in the steps of one of the all time greats to catch a river monster. Went to the dam where Jeremy Wade once was(and Ethan Roberts ). He went into that concrete box to catch a lamprey in the episode, Vampires of the Deep. I had a different goal, and that was to catch a musky. Got on the road by 5 am and was on the river for 9 hours. The river is at the lowest its been in a year, which meant there were about 4 holes that probably held fish. I know the one definitely did because I saw a 40" fish chase something into less than a foot of water. While fishing the same holes, I was able to spot the fish, and put a glide bait and spinner bait in front of his face, but he turned away both times. The fish definitely wanted a more finesse presentation today. I started out with a spinner and was having some success in the rifflea, but when I was fishing the pools, there was no action. It was only later in the day that I started using my megabass sleeper gill and the epf grub. The sleeper gill was working pretty good, but the only color I had was a neon blue and orange pumpkinseed, in a river with very few sunfish. I missed a hookset on a 2.5lb fish, which was probably the biggest bass that was outside of the very large pools. I also tied on the EPF minnow, which is a fantastic finesse bait, exactly what the bass wanted. It was very hard to cast with my 20lb braid, but towards the end, I was catching fish every cast. The musky bite didn't happen today, but i will definitely be back, probably with some finesse and more realistic looking baits.