To boost your catch rate, try fishing strategically with a partner. Here’s how

TWEAK WHAT WORKS

Once we know what the fish want, we take things up a notch and fine-tune our presentation even more, often surprising ourselves in the process. For example, I might choose the pointed end of a four-inch soft-plastic worm to adorn my Ned jig, while Liam opts instead to pin the bulbous end to his jig. Some days he’ll cream me; some days it’s the other way around.

It’s also at this stage that we tag team back and forth, rotating through different colour options. One afternoon this past summer, for example, we figured out the muskies wanted us to burn Super Shad Raps at warp speed about four feet under the surface, then stop reeling to let the lures rise up before putting the pedal to the metal once again. Doing that, we were able to raise some quality fish. Then Liam switched over to his favourite colour—bright Firetiger perch—and you’d have thought he’d flicked a switch. The big toothy predators began savagely slashing at his bait, while continuing to only follow my cisco-coloured lure through lazy figure eights.

Something else tag-teaming has taught us about fishing for apex predators is that you must keep switching things up. When we’re fishing for walleye, bass, crappies and perch, we can confidently keep using the same presentation once we’ve determined the proper depth, retrieval speed and size, shape, and colour of our baits. But when we’re fishing for muskies, pike and often lake trout, one of us needs to keep looking around the corner for whatever better pattern is evolving. I think muskies, in particular, get quickly conditioned to avoiding certain baits once they’ve seen them a few times. That means you have to rotate through the line-up to continually show them something different.

Over to you, partner.