Green Bay is the part of Lake Michigan that got folded in and forgotten about, a long green arm of water running up between Wisconsin and the Door Peninsula with limestone shelves on one side and marsh on the other. In late August it is warm on top, stained the color of weak tea, and full of alewives and gizzard shad and every other thing a large predator could reasonably want. It also holds some of the biggest musky anybody has ever put a tape on, which is why the boat ramps at four in the morning are full of people who have all agreed not to talk about specific spots.
You should understand what you are signing up for. A musky rod is not a fishing rod so much as a piece of scaffolding. The lures weigh half a pound and look like small waterfowl having a bad day. The net could be used to recover a person from a canal. And the arithmetic that every musky angler recites, the ten thousand casts per fish, is not a joke made by outsiders, it is a number that the people who fish for them repeat with a kind of grim pride. Nobody has ever caught a musky by accident while reaching for a sandwich.
The part that breaks people is the figure eight. You bring the lure all the way to the boat, and instead of lifting it out you drop the rod tip in the water and sweep the lure in a long lazy eight alongside the hull, over and over, because there is a decent chance a fish has followed it the whole way in without you knowing. Sometimes you see nothing. Sometimes a shape the size of a canoe paddle materializes two feet under your hands, keeping pace, watching the lure with the flat unbothered attention of a landlord. Your job at that moment is to keep making smooth turns and not scream, and roughly half of that is achievable.
We fished two days with a woman out of Oconto who guides the bay in summer and welds in the winter, and who has the only genuinely calm figure eight we have ever seen. She counted follows the way other people count fish. Nine on the first day, four of them serious, none of them committing. She did not seem remotely bothered. She said the follows are the fishing and the eats are just the receipt, which sounded like something you tell yourself until you watch her do sixty of those turns in an hour without her wrist changing speed once.
It came on the second afternoon off a rock point in about eleven feet, a follow we never saw until the third loop of the eight, and it ate on the turn with the rod already low and the angle all wrong. Forty-eight inches, a body like a fire hose, released alongside the boat with everybody soaked and nobody talking. Somebody asked her later how many casts that had taken. She said she stopped counting years ago because the number was starting to look like a diagnosis.