“Wisconsin Muskie Fishing with Brian Long”

Part 2: Fishing Where the Ciscos Live

Editor’s Note: Brian Long from Glidden, Wisconsin, owns and operates Brian Long’s Muskie Guiding and has been guiding for muskies for 40 years.

Question: What’s a cisco?

Long: The cisco is a little, white baitfish that looks much like a shad. When I’m fishing clear-water lakes, I use a Mepps Giant Killer because it has a willow-leaf-shaped blade to allow me to fish the lure deeper than I can the Colorado blade. In these sterile clear-water lakes, you want your lure to go down as far as 40- or 50-feet deep. The Giant Killer is weighted, and it has a blade that doesn’t cause the lure to ride-up high in the water column. The willow-leaf-shaped blade spins closer to the shaft of the lure; therefore, it doesn’t have as much lift as the Colorado blade, which makes it much easier to fish the lure down 10 to 12 feet when you cast it.

I want my anglers to keep their lures as deep as they can in clear water for as long as they can. Then at the end of their retrieves, when the lures start coming up to the surface of the water, we’ll be able to see the muskies if they’re behind or below the lure. They look like big, brown logs as they come up out of that deep water chasing Mepps Giant Killers.

Question: How do you get them to bite when you start your figure-eight?

Long: Most of the time, you don’t get them to bite. However, we still get our fishing clients to make deep circles or deep figure-eights with their rods. If the fish are really active, they’ll turn around and take the baits. If they’re not active, however, there’s really nothing you can do to make them bite. I’ve read a lot of magazine articles about fishermen who plan to catch a lot of muskie in clear-water lakes when they’re doing their figure-eights, and maybe they do. But in my experience, only a small percentage of the muskies in clear-water lakes will take the spinner when you start doing the figure-eight by the boat.

Now, the muskie can take the bait anytime from when the lure enters the water until you take it out of the water. But, I found that the most active muskies, the ones you’re most likely to catch, will take the lures on the retrieves and not when you’re doing the figure-eights. If they take the Giant Killers on the retrieves, then the muskies are out in front of you and are much easier to fight and land.

Question: Do you catch more muskie in the clear-water lakes and/or the stained-water lakes?

Long: We catch about 50-percent on the clear-water lakes and about 50-percent on the stained-water lakes. However, the muskies in clear-water lakes have an advantage because they don’t have to rely on the shoreline. They can feed anywhere out in the lake. Many times, they’ll be suspended out in the deep water, but that’s a technique we’ll talk about on another day.

Question: Do most of your clients like to fish the clear water or the stained water?

Long: The answer to that question really depends on how much muskie fishing experience the fisherman has, and whether he wants to catch a really big muskie or just catch as many muskies as he can. In the stained water, the muskies will be concentrated in the shallow water, so there will be a higher chance of catching the muskies in the shallow water. On the other hand, in the clear water where the muskies are suspended, they don’t have as much fishing pressure, so these muskies can usually grow to larger sizes.

Question: How much time does an angler fishing with you need to catch a muskie?

Long: We average catching more than one legal-sized muskie a day. Now, some days we may catch two or three muskies, and some days we might not catch any. But, if you average out the number of fish caught and the anglers who fish with us throughout the year, we average about one muskie a day.

Question: How are you able to have that kind of average?

Long: I’ve been fishing for muskies for over 40 years, and the majority of my customers are pretty good muskie fishermen.

Question: How do you decide whether you’re going to fish the stained-water or clear-water lakes?

Long: The fishermen make that decision. Most of the people who fish with me have done so for 20 or 30 years, so I know what kind of places they like to fish. If I get a new fisherman, I’ll take him to what I call an “action lake,” a lake where we’ll see more muskies, although they may not be as big as what we’d see in a clear-water lake. Now, if I got a fisherman who’s caught some 50-inch muskie before, then he’s the fisherman that I’ll be taking to those clear-water lakes.

Question: What size of muskies are you catching in those clear-water lakes?

Long: The muskies may be as much as 40- to 54-inches, and we’ve caught muskies up to 40 pounds in both clear water and stained water. Recently, we caught a 50- and a 49-incher, and they both came from stained water. Therefore, although we tend to believe that the bigger muskies are coming out of clear water, we’re still catching big muskies out of stained water also.

To learn more about muskie fishing, contact Brian Long at 715-264-4974, or email him at brianlong@centurytel.net.