END of Field Season #1: Thank You Muskies Canada

We spent November 23rd tracking fish on the Ottawa River, successfully finding most of our fish. Motor problems arose as the day went on and any attempt to return later in the week was stifled. As such, five months and one day later made November 23rd my last day of field season #1.

Below you'll find a few pictures of what we've been doing since my last blog entry. We've been electrofishing to obtain baseline controls for the physiology portion of our study. However, some of the muskies we electrofished came from water temperatures lower than those we angled from, so we had to go back and try to capture (via hook-and-line) muskies from colder water. We caught two small muskies at 31 and 32 inches, one of which had an old surgically implanted radio tag from a tracking study conducted two years ago.I'd like to extend a big THANK YOU to all the members of Muskies Canada that volunteered their time to help out with the project. Without your support none of this would be possible. To the NEC, thank you for helping fund Project Noble Beast! I'd also like to thank Muskies Inc. and the Becker Foundation for their financial contributions. Hopefully some of my fellow Americans can come up next summer to help volunteer with the study! Thanks everybody!

Lastly, I will update this blog as new developments arise. Stay tuned!

Circle Hook Success

Yesterday marked the fifth capture of a muskie for our live-bait study. So far we have one on a quick-strike, two on J-hooks (one dead), and two on circle hooks including yesterday's catch.

As you can see by the photo, the circle hook performed flawlessly and gave us a textbook hook-up. After about 4.5 minutes the fish began to speed toward deeper water away from the boat. It was at that time that I engaged the reel and began reeling quickly and steadily. The line tightened and the battle was on.

Perhaps this method could be a safe, viable method of passively fishing muskies with live-bait.