Lake Scugog Musky Report, June 2006

Since musky season opened on the first Saturday of June, Team Fury has been hard at work each weekend chasing the fish of ten thousand casts. Contrary to past musky trips, locating fish was extremely difficult. We targeted musky on Lake Scugog which is located about an hour from Toronto, Ontario. While Scugog is very close to the largest city in Canada, it hold a surprisingly high number of musky, most of which average 30-35 inches in length.

Each of our visits to Scugog fell on inconsistent weather patterns. We found ourselves in the middle severe cold fronts on our first two visits, and ideal weather on our third visit. Despite the good weather we were only able to coax one small musky to follow our bait. The fourth visit again had ideal weather. This time I set out with our friend Bill who had put me on numerous musky last summer. I felt good about the weather conditions and I knew Bill’s wealth of knowledge chasing Scugog muskies would make the trip a success.

We headed out at 1am in grand Fury style and got to the launch well before sunrise. Since we were early we decided to get a couple hours sleep before we launched the boat at sunrise. We awoke a few hours later, missing the sunrise all together. We quickly got the boat in the water, hoping to make up for lost time. There were already several boats on the water, which was expected since this was the first day of bass season in the region. While the bass fishermen hugged the shallow shorelines looking for largemouth bass, we drifted in deeper water throwing baits for musky.

There wasn’t much excitement for the first hour or two and then I finally hooked into my first musky of the year, a 30 incher caught on one of my baits I had made the week before. Not long after I set the hook into something with some weight on it, and hauled in my first legal sized fish of the year which measure just under 37 inches in length. With two musky in the boat, Bill figured it was now his turn to get some action and pulled in a beautiful 19 inch largemouth bass.

The wind changed directions a couple times and then really calmed down. Bill decided to throw a big top water bait, hoping for his first ever top water musky. It didn’t take long for another 37 inch fish to smash his bait as only a musky can. We continued casting for musky and occasionally changed up baits in search of bass. I managed one nice sized largemouth and we each got a few panfish before we decided to call it a day after 13 hours on the water.

We visited a fellow musky fisherman to share our little success story before heading back into the city. On the drive home we decided to do it all over again on Sunday and get a few more fish in the boat. Unfortunately, we lost all three musky we hooked into that day. Although we didn’t put as much time in on the water we did catch a few nice bass, including a couple smallmouth which are pretty rare on Scugog. I managed to catch several species of fish on my own bait, including musky, bass, rockbass, perch and a small walleye.

It was nice to get into some decent fish again, and hopefully Jon and I will be out on the water with Bill in the near future trying to repeat the success we had last year.

Monday June 26th, 2006 @ 5:19 PM | Clive Mathias