In our hunt for these magnificent beasts, afternoon floats and seasons of activity blur into short, punctuated snapshots of feelings. The lingering burn of fluoro slicing through my weakened skin, the smoke from a cold two stroke motor reminding me that there are smells other than rain and damp, rotting wood. Everything in muskie season feels disjointed. My thoughts, my personality, the foul rainy weather, the intel gathered while walking through the fly shop or gleaned from scanning social media, everything feels broken apart, a small piece of the bigger picture. But, typically, terribly disappointingly so, that bigger picture is almost never revealed in our chase for those long green monsters prowling not so far from home. By the end of the season, the muskie pursuit feels to me like a series that you have read with great passion for some time. The series has had its highs and lows, characters have been tried and tested and the anti-heroes you are following have shown some development but, just as the end comes into sight, the final chapters are ripped away from the reader leaving you wondering how everything all fits together. That is the muskie fishing that I know. And it’s both brilliantly captivating and hauntingly boring at times. Like the old quote about war, ‘twenty-three hours of boredom and one hour of sheer terror’, that about describes the actual pacing of the fishing; long, plodding days with nothing to show for it besides dried and cracked calluses and limp, empty nets.

Sometimes we do get a little bit of closure. Sometimes that takes four seasons, a new boat, dozens of fly patterns, shiny new rods and a plethora of other things. But it’s worth it, right? It has to be… otherwise, what’s the point? To prove our masochism? Sure, that seems valid. But we do need a victory every once in a while, and on a rainy, overcast day some few weeks ago we found just that; the hour of terror after the interminable boredom, we caught a fish. The ‘right’ one, so to speak, not just an eager bass looking for a week’s worth of calories in a single bite, a muskie. Collin’s first. A well-earned fish that probably was close to his ten thousandth cast in pursuit of the cryptid. If my friend had truly ever had to ‘earn’ a fish, this was it. Hours, days, weeks, seasons, years later, and he had finally caught one. And by muskie standards, not a unique fish in the slightest. All those long hours netted him a fish that weighed no more than others we catch on a regular basis. This fish was different though maybe because we made it so. Hunting that one bite for so long makes it obvious that the fish itself was the bycatch of the pursuit, the chase was perhaps the real reason all along.