Make a Move to Deeper Structures and Water

There are those among us who prefer to push the limits of musky fishing and those who prefer to stick with what they know.  Both are great rules to live by, and each has their flaws.  When it comes to pushing your limitations, some of the best advice sprouted by professional anglers is to take a chance moving away from the pressured banks of the lakes and rivers and start testing out your game on open or deep water.

More often than not, if you’re not the only boat on the lake, a casual observation might be made of the constant boating pattern of positioning boats within 40 feet of shore and casting directly in that location.  This might be the pattern to stick to if you were fishing for shoreline frogs, but muskies have a unique perspective of their aquatic surroundings that isn’t too dissimilar from that of a person living in a small town.  You have your home, favorite gas station, grocery store, car wash, and coffee shop.  And even when you are at home, you don’t stay in the same zone inside your home until you are ready to settle in for the night.

The same can be applied to a muskie’s underwater environment.  The shoreline weeds and woods are just one of the many places that muskies might haunt during their daily surveillance of the territory and predation motivations.  Within the body of the lake lies all types of places that muskies might traverse in search of their ultimate goal: food.  These places might be out in the dead center of a lake where a known pile of crappies sits tightly against a 60-year-old tire, or it might be on an almost surfacing hump that grows the greenest cabbage and fattest perch.  These relative behaviors apply across predatory creatures, and muskies are no different.

As anglers, identifying map structure prior to testing a fishery is incredibly important, followed by marking locations of interest only learned by time on the water.  Patches of nearby deep weeds or structural shelves located near feeding zones are often the best places to find muskies when the shallow window has died.  Muskies are not couch potatoes despite many things you have heard.  They don’t stay in the same spot every hour of every day.  They definitely move.

So, this season, take a look at your local water.  Take a day and note all of the interesting features, whether by sonar depth map, side scan, or physical topographical map.  Take a break from the mindset of casting at the shoreline indefinitely.  You might be surprised that the biggest musky in the lake is posted up on an 18-foot shelf, waiting for a walleye-colored lure to swim by.