Fall is a time muskie anglers can’t wait for. Cooling water temps and hungry fish make the fish of 10,000 casts a realistic hope for many. Dave Karczynski, author and muskie aficionado, goes about fall muskie fishing in a unique manner, setting up his own “Muskie Camp.” In his most recent book, Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life, he recounts his journeys throughout the world chasing fish. This excerpt below reflects what muskie fishing is all about.
To get your own copy of Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life, click HERE.
Why I do Muskie Camp:
First things first: Muskie camps are not a thing. As far as I know, my friends and I run the only one in existence. I’m not even sure that camp is the right word. There’s no wood plaque with a hand-carved rainbow trout that would welcome you to a fish camp, only a crush of reeds where we pull the boats up through the alders and out of sight. There’s no shack with a woodstove and eight-pointer hanging on the porch, though we share the deer hunter’s indifference to hygiene. No, our muskie retreat is a tent-and-tarp, public-land sort of affair, our only residential luxury the waxed canvas A-frame our spiritual leader, an enthusiast of 18th-century voyageur culture, packs along from time to time. By day, we ply the black water for muskies. By night, we drink whiskey under a dark sky. Sometimes, but not always, we smell like Esox.
Explaining how our first camp came about is simple: We plotted the farthest-most point from any paved road in the Midwest and went to check the fishing. The river we settled on, a swampy, low-country watershed that defied development and swallowed two tracks whole, was so little known we dared not bring anything but a canoe. That first year we paddled a full ten miles looking for high ground to camp on and eventually found it, along with a wolf pack that howled to either warn or welcome us, no one can say which. And we caught fish; or rather, one of us caught enough fish to make the others believe they could too.
Explaining how muskie camp happened for the first time is one thing. But accounting for why it stuck, why muskie camp became an annual event with all the fixity of Christmas—explaining that is another thing altogether. If I had to come up with a reason—and my editor deems this wise—I’d hazard it’s for the particularly sublime nature of the discoveries made at muskie camp. These are not your everyday bits of knowledge. They have little to no application to the outside world. They won’t make you money or find you love, can’t help you out with a flooded basement or do your taxes. And yet—or maybe because of this—the teachings of muskie camp seem to be essential lessons for the good life, or at least the life I care to live.
Because of muskie camp I can think through the origins of faith and its variations, since any muskie fly box is an attempted conversation with the Unknown.
Because of muskie camp I know that the shape of a river also has a sound, best played by the stylus of an old Evinrude, best heard over the crackle of a campfire.
Because of muskie camp I know that whiskey has utilities beyond the mere tonic, that on moonless nights it becomes an agent of navigation, conferring if not sight itself then at least the conviction of it, which is sometimes superior.
Because of muskie camp I know that a man who makes a terrible housekeeper when surrounded by brooms and vacuums can become, when handed an axe, the dictionary definition of neatness. That black bear backstrap is first and foremost a breakfast food, especially when wrapped in venison bacon.
Because of muskie camp I know if you get lucky once, you revel, and if you get lucky twice, you row. That the human body is a tool whose edges fade with time, though there are activities that provide fair compensation for the blunting.
Lastly, I now know that not all time is created equal—that muskie time, those rare minutes spent in hand-to-hand combat with a fish, is exceptional. Though few in number (spread out over a lifetime, even the luckiest in our group will be hard-pressed to break the ten-minute mark by the time he makes his Final Cast), these moments are great in size, towering over all those hours caught in traffic, blotting out years spent staring at screens. And they keep growing in height, those muskie memories, year after year. Maybe, in the end, that’s what makes muskie camp so special, the great size of your life there when you look back on it—so tall you can barely, even on a clear day, see the top.
Your writing has a way of resonating with me on a deep level. I appreciate the honesty and authenticity you bring to every post. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.