On the Thursday of opening week, my brother and I were fishing an area that consists of a giant weed flat, a couple of football fields in size. We’d caught & released three Muskies, Mike had two and I had just one dinker to show from six hours of casting big baits. My back was starting to ache, so I switched up to a small 1/2 oz spinner bait, one normally used to catch Bass. Under usual circumstances, this is a good idea, but at this time of year, Bass are in full-spawn mode and will attack anything that comes near their nest.

As we were drifting across the 5-foot deep flat, we came up on a hump that we could clearly see Bass spawning on, so I waited until I could see the weed edge and I tossed out the spinnerbait. I burned it across the weed-tops until it reached the edge, let it drop for a second and re-engaged the reel to bring it up the hump. Just as the blades stopped fluttering and it was almost out of the water, the Muskie came sauntering out of the weeds like it owned the place. I had enough time to realize what was happening and alert my brother with a quick “HEY!”.

The fish grabbed the spinnerbait and immediately started thrashing, basically setting the hook itself! The fight was a short one, as I was able to keep it from jumping by keeping my rod-tip low, and an excellent net-job by my brother.

The fish was a chunky one measuring in at a respectable 44″. Right after the release shot was taken, Mike switched the camera to video & filmed her swimming away strong, to fight another day.

- Musky Bill

Bill, thank you very much for you entry into our 2010 Contributor Contest and boy what a beautiful musky! You have taken THIRD PLACE in our contest and will receive 3 custom lures from Rockstar Lures (which I believe you’re already very familiar with) as well as a copy of Fins & Skins magazine!

In more exciting and fishing related news I went fishing at Lake Scugog with Ed on Sunday. This time we geared ourselves up for Bass hoping to land some big ones in the thick Scugog weeds. We were amazed that there was nobody on the lake considering it’s a holiday weekend, we had high hopes. Unfortunately the weather decided to throw all kinds of things at us, everything from wind to seriously heavy rain to brutal sun. Luckily not lightning though. It definitely wasn’t easy but we managed to catch a few decent fish, but most importantly of all have a good time.

Don’t forget to check out our cool and new project Legendary Fishermen a social network for fishermen.

The move will happen sunday night/monday morning and I hope that it’s quick and painless. While you’re waiting we invite you to our newest project, it’s still beta so be gentle!

Legendary Fishermen is a community site focused on bringing people that love fishing together. Our aim is to create a community where people can share their love of fishing, meet fellow anglers around the world, and display the infinite spectrum of wonder the fishing world has to offer.

The site is running WordPress MU and Buddy Press, We’ve never run a site like this before so we thought, why not get release early and let the needs of community dictate the direction and features of the site. Ultimately you will be able to connect with other anglers around the world, read their blogs, write your own too of course, and more! Right now the blog creation is turned off until I can figure out some of the settings and themes, but your blog url would be something like myblogname.legendaryfishermen.com, that and 500MB of space for your photos and videos all for the price of.. FREE!

Have fun and I hope to see some new members and groups when I get back from Lake Scugog tomorrow afternoon. I hope everyone is having a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to send you a couple of new photos from September of 2008 from the Scugog river, and congratulate you guys on the great job you are doing on your website. I also won’t to thank you for highlighting me on the website, and the great comments. So thank you and congratulations. Here is a decent Scugog bucket and a 12lb musky my dad got into on the first week of September.

Thanks Paul, nice fish!

In other news, we have reached 900 posts on Fishing Fury, 400+ images on Catch the Fury, and passed 1500 comments (not including 62,512 spam comments) all this week!

Check out Paul’s submissions below!

Thanks Paul!

Thought you might enjoy these pics. All mine (red shirt) were caught on the same spinner bait. Mike’s musky was 50′ and about 25 lbs. – Curt

Awesome job Curt, keep sending those photos our way!

Apparently though, the fishing has been off due to the extremely bizarre weather conditions we’ve been having in this region. Twice now in the past week there have been hail storms, lightning that can blow you away, even reports photos of funnel clouds forming in Toronto’s east end (more).

Since I was so caught up with work in May, I missed all opportunities to go fishing on Toronto Islands for some of the hottest pike fishing in the GTA: this would be my first fishing trip of the year.

We started the morning bright and early, got the boat launched and headed out. It wasn’t long before Martin had a hit and nice 25″ or so Scugog musky. I thought for sure the day was going to be awesome, and not soon after I had a massive strike from a musky of my own, definitely larger than the first. A huge jump, splash, and suddenly my lure was catapulted back to the boat and my musky was gone.

For the rest of the day, we fished with little success, even with my Lakemaid Miss Musky t-shirt for good luck, it couldn’t stop the weather from turning on us. Another storm front was on its way and we decided to head back up the lake closer to the boat launch in case the storm crossed paths with us. Not soon after we had a failure of our trolling motor and decided to head in to try and fix it. We spent a few hours going around Port Perry trying to find some spare parts or figure out what the problem was, but once 7pm started to roll around we knew the day was pretty much shot. We packed it all in and headed home.

Martin will be fishing in the B.A.S.S. opener tournament on Scugog Sturgeon, so wish him luck! If I had known sooner I would have loved to get “Fishing Fury” on his shirt or something as a sponsor but maybe we can pull that together for the next one.