Is it Muskie or Musky, after searching the web, seems like both abbreviations of the name Muskellunge are both right. Oh well if I got it wrong in the title, lol. Anyways, this is a few pictures of my brother Jason with some of the muskie and walleye he caught on the Detroit River this spring. Him and his friend were hitting the fish pretty hard! Detroit River is known for producing some really large smallmouth bass, Muskellunge, Walley, and Sturgeon. Sometimes jig fisherman hook Sturgeon, it's because they are bottom feeders primarily. So if you're using a Berkley Powerbait or Gulp, they'll suck it right because of the strong scent from these lures. You just better have some strong line on your rod and reel or they will snap your line in a heart beat.

Anyways, back to the pictures at hand. Check them out, the first one I posted is of my brother and his Muskie. It's not a very big one, but what Muskie is small? They are all pretty big, whether they are a young Muskie or baby. These fish are big!

If you're fish the Detroit River, make sure you're using a heavy line, Fireline or Spider Wire is a good braided choice. My brother and his friend use it as a leader, so they can still use their regular monofilament in their reel. If you use regular monofilament line, the Muskellunge and Walleye's teeth will shred right through the line. And you'll hate yourself for losing such a great fish!

This is a really big Walleye my brother caught, he was very proud of this catch. He stated "it's definitely the biggest Walleye I have ever caught." My brother is 6' 4", so believe me the Walleye is much bigger than it looks! Just compare it's length to my brother's torso, it's definitely a good size Walleye!

And some more pictures for you fisherman fans! All these fish were caught on the wonderful lake, Lake St. Clair! That day we caught fourteen fish all together, my girlfriend caught that northern pike you see in the picture. That's the biggest fish she has ever caught. It's not a very big pike, but it's definitely of good size. Her eyes lit up when she was reeling it to the boat.

When my girlfriend was reeling it in she kept her pole straight with the fish and line. I yelled at her immediately, keep your rod up! I told her, "you always want to have your rod bent, it relieves tension on the line." She listened to me and actually landed the pike. I was so excited for her, this is what it's all about! Teaching the sport to others, whether it's your girlfriend, family, or friends! It makes the sport more exciting and enjoyable, and boy was she excited!

This is a picture of me and some of the smallmouth bass I caught on Lake St. Clair. No walleye, which we were fishing for that day. But, that's ok, it was a very beautiful day! The lake was calm and there was barely no wind, perfect for jigging for walleye. You can feel the fish bite and see your line pull. The pike in this picture down below is the one my girlfriend caught.

I like this picture, this is one of me trying to land a smallmouth bass.  It's not easy to do without a net, you have to carefully tilt your rod up and open the bass's mouth with your thumb.  Just like everything else, the more practice you get, the better you'll be at it.  And I'm a little rusty, but I finally landed it and got a picture of the nice size smallmouth bass. The picture looks better in high definition, I down sized the picture in photoshop so it loads faster on the internet. In the high def picture you can really see the water droplets in the air and also the splashing of the water.

My girlfriend said that this picture down below looks like one of those fish on the plaque that sings. "It's all straight and sings!" I'm like you're right, that's why it's the first picture I posted in these group of pictures. The dorsal fins are out, along with the other beautiful fins on the fish. This is what any fisherman would call the perfect picture!

Man check this baby out, this motha trucka is around give pounds, maybe even six pounds. Not sure, at the time I couldn't find my fish scale. I knew it was somewhere in the boat, but since these fish are spawning I didn't want to keep the smallmouth out of the water too long. When I put the smallmouth back in, she did not want to swim away. So I moved her through the water gently, trying to run oxygen and water through her gills. Eventually she gained strength and got up took off. This smallmouth faught very hard, at first I thought it was a big pike, the smallmouth hit like a ton of bricks man. Then she fought for a good 3-4 minutes or so, really must of tired her out since she had a hard time swimming away. Of course I'm gunning for pike and walleye right now, but these smallmouth in the pictures down below were gratefully appreciated! They both were caught in Lake St. Clair, such a beautiful lake. Man, I can almost guarantee that the next record smallmouth bass for Michigan is going to be caught out of Lake St. Clair, the lake holds some monster smallmouth in there.

This is the other beauty I caught, this one I weighed, it came to five pounds. Not sure which one is bigger, I think the one up above may be longer, but this one down below did have a huge stomach. The lure I caught both on was a Berkley Powerbait jig, I've been using either pumpkin seed or a green colored jig. Man I don't know if I'll ever be able to top these monster, definitely the biggest smallmouth bass I have ever caught. Now that I have a boat it's I'm able to reach the really big fish, I'm so grateful! It definitely beats shore fishing hands down!

Man I've been so busey lately, haven't had time to post anything up on the web. I finally found a boat on Craigslist, let me tell you first that I got really luck with this one. The owner of the boat listed it on Craigslist at 3am, since I'm a night owel and always browsing the web at that time I caught it immediately. I was so anxious, I stayed all the way up to 10am the next day to give the owner a call. I got a voice mail, left a message, fifteen minutes later the owner called back and we set up an appointment to check it out.

Soon as I arrived at the owners place to see the 16 foot Smoker Craft boat, there was another taker who put a bid in. I was nice to the owner and said what's going on? I explained to him since I'm the first caller, I should have first bid right? He agreed with me, but he said I must bid higher than the person who got there before me. So I offered him $5700 and he took it! I was so excited, I just couldn't wait to take her out and do some fishing!

After that I had to quickly find a hitch and install it on my girlfriend's Dodge Durango. All this happened so quickly I reall didn't have much planned out. Let me tell you it was such a pain in the ass getting the rusted bolts off the back of the frame on the Durango. I ended up breaking two socket wrenches, in order to get all the bolts off I had to go buy a breaker bar at Home Depot. Should of just done that in the first place, but hey, I'm no mechanic.

Finally the hitch was on and I got to go pick up my new Smoker Craft boat the next day. After I got the boat, my friend Jason who is pretty mechanically enclined hooked up the wiring to get the trailer lights working. Everything was good and ready, till' I found out that the whole console didn't light up, the live well didn't work, and the bildge pumping wasn't draining. Well after fooling with the wires in back of the dashboard, come to find out the black negative wire in back wasn't on the battery. I totally didn't see it, because it's dark in the cubby hole and there was two big wires already hooked up two the battery. Well there's two more little wires, and the red positive cable was hooked up, but not the black. So I hooked the small negative wire up and everything was good to go. Bildge pump was working, along with the dashboard lights and livewell.

See there's more to the story than that, I kind of thought there was an electrical problem from the get go because the owner told me he couldn't get anything working on the dashboard. He was fooling with wires down below and he thought he messed something up. That's why I thought there was an electrical problem from the first place. Of course the first thing I check was to see if the battery wires were hooked up, I just missed that small negative wire hanging in the back. But oh well, this is my first boat and stuff like this happens. It's actually good that it happened because I got to read a lot of stuff in the Smoker Craft boat manual. I learned where all the wires were ran throught the boat as well.

Well, now that everything was good and ready, now it's fishing time! I've been taking this bad boy out just about everday of the week. Now that I'm out of work I can fish all I want and go out anytime I want, it's such a stress relief.

Here's some shots I got of the lake, of course I have more but I'll post them up in a separate thread. On back of my 2000 16 foot Smoker Craft Millentia is a 75 horsepower Mercury, it definitely gets up and goes quite well. The top speed is around 40mph on a good day.

Here's the first fish I caught on the boat, it was a young smallmouth bass. It was also the only fish we caught of the day too, my brother who was fishing with me got skunked. It happens, it happened to me a day down the road. And sorry that the picture is blurred, my brother didn't wait for the camera to focus. Don't worry, I have plenty of other fish we caught of the boat, they are a lot bigger too!

Fishing with waders can be a very fun experience, but to be honest with you it can be a very dangerous experience as well. You know what it's like to get stuck in muck underwater? I've heard of horror stories of fisherman getting stuck in muck and then losing their lives because of it. The last thing you want to do is accidentally sacrifice your life while fishing. So fisherman, please be safe. Think things through before you go on a big fishing expedition. Waders is a good way to fish, but it might not be the safest. I suggest either getting a low cost boat like I bought such as Bass Raider or just stay fishing from the shore, it's your safest bet. Plus reeling in your fish in a set of waders can be offly hard. And then there's accidentally dipping your reel into water, you know it's going to happen. This can be a pain because if you go wader fishing a lot you're going to have to keep your reel greased up afterwards to keep it running smoothly and not rust out. Like I said, you're best bet is to stay fishing from off shore or in a boat. I say save your money and don't by fishing waders, this is from personal experience, fisherman friends, and other fisherman around the internet.

Young Bassmaster pro angler Jonny Schultz discusses how valuable Strike King's new soft plastic bait Rage Tail Bait is. He goes through the Baby Rage Craw, the Rage Hawg, and the Smokin' Rooster. After seeing this fishing video, I definitely want to give the Rage Tai a try. These soft baits might work really good at the lakes near me.

New to the soft plastic world is the rage tail bait by Strike King. Strike King claims this is the next generation of action and innovation for soft plastic baits. I still haven't tried one yet, but the long squiggly tail could be promising. Strike King also has a large selection of colors and sizes of the Rage Tail bait, which is great when you have to diversify while fishing. I for one would love to try out there Rage Tail Lizard, this would be great for the ponds I fish at up north in Michigan. Also I think this would be dynamite at Kent Lake on largemouth bass.

So do you fisherman think the fishing state records are getting harder to break for the future? I think they are, it's getting very hard to find a record size bass, piker, or walleye. I think it's mainly due to a larger population or fisherman and pollution. These species of fish aren't able to achieve a large size. Now maybe I'm wrong, but there are a lot of state records that haven't been broken for many years.

One of the weirdest things you can catch ice fishing is a Mudpuppy, don't be alarmed when you catch one these large aquatic salamanders. A lot of these fisherman catch them in the Lake St. Clair near me. They truly look like something from the X-Files, my girlfriend would run out of the ice shanty screaming if she saw something like this. I never caught one these things, thank god, have you? Looks like they could be a pain in the butt unhooking.

So what's your favorite setup for smallmouth bass fishing? You can post your own setup down below in the comments section. My favorite setup is using a:

• Six Foot Size Medium Action Rod
• Quantum Spinning Reel
• Clear 8lb Berkley Trilene Fishing Line
• Lure Wise: Bomber Crankbait, Gitzit, Beetle Spin, or Berkley Powerbait