In this day of giant bucktails and soft plastics, crankbaits tend to be overlooked. However, they have triggered many of Joe’s best muskies in recent years.
As I was putting together my annual PowerPoint seminar for Sportshows, it quickly dawned on me how many times crankbaits have saved my fishing trips. In fact, as I reviewed last season’s photo library, it became blatantly obvious crankbaits not only saved some trips for me, but they saved my entire season! my largest muskies in June, July and august last season all came on crankbaits!
Wait a minute, I almost forgot about October. My best musky in the fall came on a crankbait, too.
What brings this comparison into even more clarity is how few hours I spent casting crankbaits versus all the other lure groups. I am certain I spent far more time burning blades over weed flats and shallow reef tops as well as creeping various topwaters over the surface in diminished light. I dedicated way more hours with these high-riding, free-traveling lures than grinding divers along breaks, weed edges, and deeper-cresting spines. Yet, even with limited hours and overall effort, the crankbait outscored all my other lure groups on big fish during nearly every single month I fished last season. In my world, that’s a WoW revelation!
Last July, chas martin and I were on our annual early summer filming trip to Lake of the Woods. While we scored on muskies every day and were building a good film library for the 2017 “Fishing With Joe Bucher” tV season, strong winds and bad weather were indeed a factor. In one instance, chas and I had located a reef containing an entire wolfpack of muskies, and we consistently raised various sized fish from this one spot. In particular, one musky stood out from the rest as the true alpha of the pack, and she would show herself again and again in a lazy follow behind a Glideraider. No matter how many times we returned, no matter how many different lures we threw her way, the fish we nicknamed “Lazy Lenny” wouldn’t commit to the strike.
This story is from the April/May 2017 edition of Musky Hunter.
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This story is from the April/May 2017 edition of Musky Hunter.
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