Everyone should know about casting the windy shore by now. This technique is always a good starting place to find active muskies.
 
What about the calm side?
 
A few years ago we fished the opener on Dryberry Lake and got hit by some heavy wind gusts. After fighting a 35 mph wind and large waves for a while, Pat suggested that we look for a calm side where we might find a fish doing exactly what we wanted to do – hide.
 
As luck would have it the due west wind limited our options. We ducked behind a large island that had a very nice weed bed in a bay nestled on the middle of the calm side and a couple of wind-swept rock points to either flank projecting out into deep water. The bed itself was dead flat calm though and we began casting.
 
Pat cast to a big SUV-sized rock sticking out of the water at the back of the bay. His lure hit about six feet in front of the huge boulder. “Nobody home!” he said.
 
I noticed a deep cut in the rock just below the surface and thought it was a good place for a lunker to hide. “Get one cast even closer.” I said.
 
After my suggestion to chuck the bait in tight, Pat obliged and hit the rock square in the middle with a crack and his bait fell into the water right in front of the cut. Pat made two cranks of his reel handle and hooked-up. Ten minutes later we had a fat 52-incher in our net that was easily in the 40-pound class. I’d show you a picture, but while Pat had the fish penned in our basket and I scrambled for the camera (it’s bad luck to have it out and ready – did you know that?), the musky reared-up and with one big jump cleared the rim and was gone. Oops! 
 

CONDITION #9:   “Sunrise”
 
I must confess that sunrise is a time of day Pat and I know the least about, mainly because we are up until all hours celebrating all the big fish we catch after the sun goes down. I’ll get to that later. We do, on occasion, fish the early bite when we are on a lake with a bunch of recreational traffic during the day. Our trip over this past 4th of July weekend to Webster Lake, Indiana is a good example of that. We wanted to get out before the jet skis and wave runners beat the surface to suds. As a result we boated matching mid-thirty inch muskies.
 
Sunrise brings out the food and it only stands to reason that the toothy critters will be on the prowl too. Now you’re never gonna see us awake that early on Dryberry – for obvious reasons – but each lake is different and you should gear your hunt to the specific situation you are facing.
 

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