Massive Muskies -- A Remarkable Fishery At A Remarkable Moment In Time

I have a 53-inch 42-pounder on my wall from Canada in the early 1990s,” says the guide. “When I caught it I thought, ‘Well, there’s my fish. That’s the one I’m looking for.’ Now? This place? When they’re going good, I see a couple fish like that a day, sometimes.”

“This place” is Minnesota’s Lake Mille Lacs. Over the past handful of seasons, this sprawling lake in central Minnesota has produced a run of muskie fishing success—big fish, in astonishing numbers—that has set the muskie world spinning. It has become the place to be if you’re a muskie angler looking for a monster.

The guide works these waters most of the season, primarily chasing muskies, with the odd walleye or smallmouth trip mixed in. “Used to fish walleyes a lot,” he says. ”Now 9 of 10 calls are about muskies, I think with good reason. The fishing’s out of this world right now.”

He asked to remain anonymous. “Guides talking about how great fishing is on their lake can be a little suspect,” he says. “Besides, too much politics among the guides, too many egos. Too old for that. Rather just keep my name out of it.”

He laughs when I suggest that having his name in an article in In-Fisherman would be good for business. “Staying busy is the least of my problems. Some times of year, I could book myself three times over and still turn people away.”

The sheer numbers of big muskies caught in Mille Lacs over the past couple of seasons, and the truly massive dimensions of some of the fish, lead to an inevitable question: Could this lake produce a new world record? It’s widely speculated that fish surpassing Minnesota’s state record, a 56-inch 54-pounder caught out of Lake Winnibigoshish in 1957, have already been caught and released. Certainly, several credible reports exist of fish that have come close. How big can they get? Is this the home of the next world record? Can the run of big fish continue?

The answer may lie in knowing how Mille Lacs became what it is today, a convergence of biology, management strategy, and changing angler behavior and ethics.

Everything that Rises Must Converge

Like many of what are now Minnesota’s premier muskie waters, Mille Lacs had muskies introduced by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) beginning in the early 1980s.

According to Tom Jones, DNR Large Lake Specialist for Mille Lacs, stocking began in 1984 with fish from hatcheries in Wisconsin. Stocking of Wisconsin-strain muskies continued until 1989, when Leech Lake-strain muskies became the brood source for the Minnesota muskie program. Initial stocking occurred annually and at intense levels—5,000 fish per year, with one year in which 10,000 muskies were planted.

With a limited amount of competition from Mille Lacs pike, newly stocked muskies thrived in an environment rich in forage—perch and suckers, and later, as muskies matured, Mille Lacs’ massive cisco population.

It’s fish from these initial intense stockings, according to Jones, that have produced exceptional trophy numbers in recent years. “Anglers talk about the sheer numbers of big fish right now,” he says. “It’s not just their perception. Our survey numbers support that observation. Fish from the initial years of stocking are 15 to 16 years old, and there are some huge year-classes of fish that age.

“In our most recent survey, if you look at female muskies, there are more fish in the population over 49 inches in length than under. We surveyed 72 females and 26 of them were over 50 inches, 5 of them over 53 inches.

“The biggest we surveyed was a 54-incher, which died,” he says. “We found her the next day. She was empty of eggs at the time and was still in the high 40-pound range. Full of eggs, she’d have been in the mid-50s, probably. That fish had a tag from a study that was ongoing in the mid-1980s—before the change to the Leech Lake strain—so it was a Wisconsin-strain fish from one of the first 3 or 4 years of stocking.”