It’s a little like religion and a lot like sex,
You should never know when you’re gonna get it next.
—Jimmy Buffett

Wile E. Coyote had the roadrunner, Tom had Jerry, Seinfeld had Newman, Charlie Brown the football, Ahab a whale, Indiana Jones an ark, King Arthur the Grail, and Gatsby the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. But no character—fictional or non—has had the relationship a musky angler has with their prey. Like an ancient alchemist asserting they can turn lead into gold or Ptolemy proclaiming the sun rotates around Earth, a musky angler believes in things science and mathematics deny.

If a musky angler were a mathematician, they’d wear out a forest of pencils deriving a way to divide by zero. If they were a physicist, they’d split atoms and glue them back together in a mad search for perpetual motion. If they were a philosopher, they’d live on a Himalayan mountaintop, alternately proving and disproving the existence of forever. But to the good fortune of modern epistemology, musky anglers are rarely in positions to waste federal funding on projects whose goals are to prove what is patently unprovable. Their proposals are so absurd that the National Office of Wild Ass Ideas (NOWAI) returns them without review.

Whereas the turf tilts against all musky anglers, some at least try to level the field. They recline in tall-back soft-ride seats and use 400-horsepower motors to propel them with GPS precision to promising coves, then deftly hurl half-pound Bull Dawgs and Medusas over 60 feet and retrieve them with precision-machined bait-casting reels. But a small band of bohemians prefers the angling equivalent of ankle weights and blindfolds. They row around in decades-old drift boats and resolutely use 9-, 10-, 11- or even 12-weight fly rods to cast half-foot heaps of earthy or pastel-colored bucktail, deer hair and feathers tied on hooks the size of a pirate’s appendage. Musky fishing with a fly is like a back-alley fistfight without gloves or a referee, provided the musky decides to show. When they don’t—which is most of the time—it’s more like shadowboxing without a shadow.

Don’t know the reason, Come back each season,
With nothing to show but a follow or two.

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