What a great story I have to share! It all started whenI woke up yesterday morning. Well it was raining, and I love rain for 2 main reasons. First it means I might get a day off, and second when it's this time of the year, I get to see if the muskies are eating!!Let me tell you, yesterday they were!! Let me start back to the beginning. Matt Hennen and I were working yesterday morning and like we hoped, we had justa few tasks to complete before we were done due to the wetness. At 9:30 we were already completed with our jobs and made a call to the boss man. He said that he had nothing for us and we could do anything we wanted. Since it was looking very muskieish out, we knew exactly what we were going to do. We arrived at the shop and decided to quick stock the truck for the next days job. Well during that 20 minutes it took us to do that, our phones rang 4 different times with new tasks for us. Lets just say that we finally arrived at the access around 2:00. It was a little frustrating, but we finally made it. After fishing a few spots and just seeing one giant lazily swimming, we were getting discouraged. Thisfeeling of discouragementwas very short lived because the muskies started showing themselves soon after!! On the next 5 spots we spotted 6 different fish and had one strike, butunfortunately did nothooked up. On the next spot as I was looking at Matt telling him a story...."WHAM" was what I felt on my rod as it was almost torn from my grips......"WHOOSH" was what I heard as the fish came out of the water as i was setting the hook!! GAME ON BABY!!! She pulled hard, but apparently not quite hard enough as I managed to win this battle between muskie and man! After a great net job by Matt it measured in at a beautiful 47 inches!! After a few photos and a release, it was time to get another!!

Over the next 2 hours, the sun went behind the clouds, the wind pulled a 180 switch on us and increased considerably! This must have been themuskie dinner bell because we spottedatleast 20 more fish come to the boatand had a few that were hooked, but not quite good enough as we lost those battles (you can't let them win them all!!) It was definitely one of those nights to be out there as the fish were very active and everywhere!! Although we only boated one fish, I would have to rank this night to be in the top 5 for muskie nights for me!We spotted a few fish that were inthe lower to mid 50 inch range, true monsters!! I wish that all of you have or can some day experience what we did last night!! I can truly say that it was "Livin' The Dream!!" Mike Ernst - Waconia, Minnesota