October 10-11 Jake, Hannah, Jessica and I set out for our annual Columbus Day weekend musky trip to Chautauqua Lake. The weather was beautiful, strangely identical to the same weekend in 2007. Friday morning we set out from We Wan Chu on one of their great Lunds w/15 HP Honda 4 stroke into a thick/thick fog. I used my GPS and really came to fully appreciate the settings I had on it from my previous outing in June at the CL musky tournament. Without the GPS the lake would have been completely unnavigable until 9:00 AM when it thinned out enough to see the shores. Water temp was between 59-61 degrees with air temperature 45 in the AM and 70 in the PM.
We trolled most of the day because there was four of us in the boat and casting would have definitely resulted in someone going to the hospital. Jake had a 36"ish musky follow his lure up to the boat.
Renting a nice boat at We Wan Chu is a breeze and affordable. We boated to Bemus Point and docked at the public dock and walked to the See Zurh House for lunch. Mayville has a large array of resteraunts for dinner choosing.
On the second day we got into large walleye, with 8-10" musky baits?!....on the inside weedline?!?!...at 10:30 AM under a full sun cloudless sky?!?! Frankly the last thing I thought I we would be into was 27" walleye, but the truth is in the pictures. Beautiful fish, which I would have love to have caught on lighter tackle. Catching this size of a fish on a musky rig is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
Jake has nailed down the art of baitcasting large musky lures. He was using an 8' St Croix rod with a Abu Garcia reel most of the day casting either Musky Innovation or Fish Tek lures. I was proud of this 13 year old as he did not get one backlash in 2 full days of fishing. The girls were troopers on Day 1 with Jessica offering lots of fishing advice and Hannah knocked off a couple new books I ought for her by Bruce Coville.
I would also like to reflect upon the water quality. In my almost 40 years of fishing on Chautauqua Lake I do not ever recall the water looking as it did this past weekend. The visibility was clear, with weeds 6-12" below the surface. The water was full of green spot algae. I wonder how much of this is related to the influx of zebra mussels. Bill Jacobs has a nice blog on invasive species and provides this link to finding the invsive species of Chautauqua Lake.
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