Muskie Log 2025

It was long and thick and hot to trot and moved smoothly into a well executed figure eight and went around twice and showed me its wide back and boxy head

I like duck season. The boat ramp parking lot is already full of trucks and trailers at first light. The blast of a shotgun in the distance is startling at first light but it is reassuring, too - competent people are at work. It’s not a crack or a report. It’s a blast - with a breathy, textured timbre and a long mechanical echo. The air cooled mud motors are loud and obnoxious, but these people know what they’re doing. They go from point A to point B as quickly as possible and set to their task with purpose. They are quick and efficient and practiced. They are rarely drunk or at least rarely drunkenly and are almost never still on the lake by mid-morning.

For a month after duck season there are crews of men that stand waist deep in neoprene waders taking docks out before winter. I like this, also. The lake has 42 miles of shoreline and nearly all of it is festooned with docks - I’d say there are more than one thousand docks on this lake. This work is a significant seasonal business here. The same guys plow snow in the winter. I’m not sure exactly what they do in the summer. The roughly fashioned custom pontoon barges plod slowly along the shore with sections of dock swinging precariously from their cranes. They reach out slowly and place the sections gently on shore where another crew stacks them away and the barges plod back out for another.

These are the sure signs of fall. The sure signs of my favorite part of muskie season, not only because the fishing gets better, but because the lake is a better place to be. Gone are the algae and weeds. Gone are the husband and wife yelling at each other as they try a third time to load their bowrider on the trailer, in the middle of a two lane ramp, their kids cowering in the back seat, six boats bobbing outside the markers waiting. Gone are the inane cruisers of the lake, hundreds of boats, back and forth and back and forth all the day long, some fast, some slow, all traffic. Gone are the screaming children being towed on tubes in and out of bays in a relentless, mind numbing, circuit of cheap thrills. Gone are the bass tournaments, good lord, the bass tournaments.

It’s hard to say whether jet skis or wake boats are the bigger scourge on this lake (I vote wake boats), but in numbers they both daily assault it. The wakes and waves vary in shade from baby poop yellow through mushy pea to lime green from the algae. There are impossibly thick mats of rotting weeds that grease the air with the smell of decay in the southern basin - weed harvesters toil at their sisyphean task just to keep a few channels open to the ramps and docks. Come visit beautiful Chautauqua Lake.

I’ve been logging a lot of things lately - it’s a type of journaling, I suppose, that ultimately has to do with the feeling of life going by faster, a clichéd symptom of “middle age.” Realistically, unless there are some major medical breakthroughs soon, I’m well over the hill. And as I get older I’m feeling the past turn into a confusing tangle of glimpses of memories, ultimately unreliable, but worn so deeply now in my mind that they are the rutted road on which my personal narrative inevitably travels.

I’ve been taking notes on every Phillies’ game I watch or listen to this season (34 out of 48 so far). I’m only a few years away from doing score cards; I can feel it in my bones.

I’ve also been carefully logging every muskie trip I’ve taken for the past two years. Initially it was, on the face of it, an effort to get better at muskie fishing, but now I realize it’s because it feels good to keep track of things and it helps keep me honest. I’ve fished a total of 39 days for muskie in 2024 and 2025 - 20 days in 2024 and 19 days in 2025. 33 days on Chautauqua, 3 days on the Allegheny River, and 3 days on Cassadaga Lakes. All 39 days were fly fishing only.

In 2024 there were five muskies landed in my boats and three others hooked and lost. In 2025 there was only one muskie landed and three hooked and lost. About one third of the days we got fish to come boatside and into the figure eight. Every single day fish reacted to and followed flies and often followed them all the way to the boat but they were too deep to see without Livescope.

There has been some correlation between new and full moons and how active the muskie are, but this is also driven by the fact that I tend to fish most new and full moons during the season. The clearest pattern I see in the log is that fish come into the figure eight more in the fall. I assume this has to do with water temperature and it sucks that NY’s season is only June through November. The biggest fish in 2024 was 40” and the biggest (only) fish in 2025 was 46.5” and thick and fat and impressive.

2025 was a grind. I was moving fish into the figure eight and even hooking some fish, I just couldn’t get one in the boat. But I kept going. I really do just enjoy the fishing. Jess was, and still is, a bit mystified by my desire to go fishing all the time without catching any fish, but she is super supportive - “If you really enjoy doing it, keep doing it.”

My birthday is November 20th, which also happened to be a new moon last year and possibly the last muskie fishing day of the season for me. Thanksgiving makes it tough to fish the last week in November. Moonrise was at 7:40am on the 20th and sunrise was at 7:14am. That’s some powerful and relatively rare mojo. It had been cold. It was a Thursday. Things were lining up. I took the day off work and was on the water at sunrise. I had given up expectations and was very close to actually not caring if I caught a fish. It was 25F and frosty. The day eventually bloomed clear and sunny and warm and still.

I fished my best spots and only saw a couple fish on the scope in the first four hours. I only moved one and it didn’t come into the eight. The lake was mostly deserted. It was glassed out. It was beautiful. I sat on spot-lock just south of the Bell Tower after striking out there in the buoy field and ate half a baguette, some Dublin Store beef jerky, and an orange. I drank a Chautauqua Lager and basked in the sun.

After lunch I ran to a point with a steep drop off, from four feet deep to thirty feet deep in about fifty feet. I marked a fish right away but he was hanging around twenty feet deep. I let the fly sink to about fifteen feet and he very lazily reacted to it. I presented the fly again and he swam off slowly. I immediately marked another fish, a little shallower but still pretty deep, and when I presented the fly it reacted immediately and aggressively. I stripped the fly faster and faster and the fish stayed on it faster and faster, it’s nose on the fly’s tail, but didn’t eat. As the fly materialized from the depths about a rod length from the boat, so did the fish. It was long and thick and hot to trot and moved smoothly into a well executed figure eight and went around twice and showed me its wide back and wide boxy head and then swam off just as fast as it had come. I whooped. Holy shit.

I kept casting and scanning but didn’t see him again so after fifteen minutes I fished down the shoreline away from the point and then back to where I started and it was about an hour later when I marked another fish, probably the same one. I made a good cast, maybe eighty feet out, and put the fly within a few feet of him and stripped only twice, sharply, quickly. I watched the fish attack the fly on Livescope but felt him through the rod an instant before I saw the take. This fish was strong and big. It took me several minutes to get him close enough to net and when I finally had him in the bag I whooped and screamed and laughed.

After the grind of the season, this fish’s size was special, but it was doubly special because it was a wild fish - no fin clips. Only 10-20% of the adult muskie in Chautauqua Lake are wild.

I got home around 3:30 that afternoon and took Fred for a walk. The low late-afternoon light and cold air and crispy leaves on the path made for a great walk and he’s a really good boy. When we got home Jess was putting together a birthday cake for me - chocolate with peanut butter buttercream and chocolate ganache. She makes me a cake every single year from scratch and it is a special thing that I find perhaps disproportionately meaningful. I’m very lucky. We ate it with chocolate peanut butter ice cream in hand-turned black cherry bowls. I took pictures of it all. It might have been the perfect day.

I’m hoping 2026 goes the same way - I’ll trade 18 fishless days for a fish like that anytime. The season opens in less than two weeks. Wish me luck.