Lake St. Clair is the Great Lake that did not make the list. It sits between Huron and Erie, twenty odd miles across and rarely deeper than a two story house, with a shipping channel dredged down the middle so the freighters do not get stuck. It also holds more muskellunge than just about any water on the continent. People call the muskie the fish of ten thousand casts. On St. Clair the regulars will tell you it is closer to a thousand, and they say it like that is a bargain.
I went out of St. Clair Shores in the second week of October with a friend named Pete, who took up muskie fishing six years ago and has not been right since. His lures live in a tub because no tackle box will hold them. The one he handed me was a rubber thing the size of a squirrel with a tail like a spatula. It weighed about a pound. Throwing it felt less like casting and more like getting rid of evidence.
The fishing is simple. You drift the weed edges in ten or twelve feet of water and throw that lure as far as you can, and then you do it again until dark. The one piece of technique is the figure eight. At the end of every retrieve you plunge the rod tip into the lake and sweep the lure around in a big loop beside the boat, because a muskie will follow a bait for sixty feet and only decide at the last second. Pete does this on every cast. He does it, I suspect, in his sleep.
For five hours nothing happened, and my shoulder filed a complaint. Then, around three, a shape came up behind my lure about twenty feet out. It was as long as a canoe paddle and it was in no hurry. I forgot everything. Pete yelled eight, eight, eight, and I shoved the rod in the water and swung, and the fish turned with the lure through the first loop, close enough that I could see the spots on its side. On the second loop it opened its mouth, thought better of it, and sank out of sight like a submarine.
I shook for a while. Pete said that was a good fish, probably forty five inches, and that a follow like that counts. I asked what it counts as. He thought about it and said it counts as the reason you come back. Then he looked at his watch, said we had two good hours left, and picked up the squirrel. I am told my cast total stands at roughly six hundred, so by local arithmetic I am nearly halfway there.
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