Just finished 3 1/2 days with the guru, Wally Robins. That’s not my name for him, that came from Gord Pyzer and if Gord Pyzer calls you a musky guru then you are a musky guru.
Being a musky guru comes with it’s drawbacks. As guide, the biggest drawback to having Wally in your boat is he hurts your numbers. As a guide I admit, I am big on numbers. I have to be. We boated 10 fish to 51 1/2 inches on this outing but I have to say it gets frustrating watching the guru give slack line to a fish after a spectacular jump when he sees it is only a 40 and calls ‘come on fish, shake that bait off’. And then, because it was a guru who made the request, the fish made another outstanding aerial and tossed the bait back to us. Yesterday’s absurd line after Wally lifted his bait quickly out of the water at the side of the boat was ‘she was only a 45’.
So, if he didn’t put everything else that touches his bait in the boat a guru could really annoy you if you were a guide out there. I guess the magic touch makes up for the ones he just decides he doesn’t want to catch.
Something else important about being a guru is total respect for our quarry. Wally remarked today that his personal highlight of the trip was watching a 48 we caught yesterday swim away. You see she inhaled a glide bait and got two of the back hooks planted firmly in her lo lower gills. She bled a lot in the net and muskies don’t have a lot of blood in their bodies. We worked together to extract the hooks and mitigate the damage but her eyes were fixed, she had zero balance, and her gills were barely moving.
This doesn’t happen often but if you fish for muskies it inevitably will. The two of us held the fish upright and as far below the surface as we could for more than 40 minutes. You can see from the photo that we are deep in a weed bed which is a good place to release an injured fish. There is more oxygen, more cover, and the ability to hide under the weeds and find slightly cooler water which is important during the summer months
When she finally swam away she was strong and able to settle into a slightly deeper pocket out of sight. We felt like her chances were good. When you musky fish you owe it to every musky to take as long as it takes to make sure they are OK. The future depends on it.
-JA
John M. Anderson
www.OttawaRiverMuskyFactory.com
We produce BIG fish!!
be good, do good, live well
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