Muskie Master - Bill Craig

By Gord Ellis

Bill Craig, his eyes inscrutable under mirror shades, studied his depth finder intently, looking for a slight dropoff that he sensed would hold a fish. His long hair blew in the wind as he slowly chewed a big wad of gum and said nothing. It was perhaps the twentieth trolling pass over the same area. I'd long since lost count.

Fifty feet behind the boat, I could see our two giant safety-pin spinners bulging the flat surface of the Ottawa River. Craig turned the 30 horsepower tiller outboard slightly to the right and the blade of his spinner reacted by breaking free of the surface. Clank, clank, clank - the clatter of the heavy willowleaf blade was unmistakable. Craig straightened the boat out again and his spinner started to sink back below the motor's wake. At the same moment, an enormous muskie - a full two-thirds of its body out of the water - appeared behind Craig's bait. Its mouth was closed, but I could almost make out its eye looking over the lure and, by extension, us. The muskie, however, made no effort to turn on the bait before sliding back underwater, like Jaws. With one slow wave of its massive tail, it vanished.

"Did you see that," I stammered to Craig, who had turned to see what I was gawking at.

"Yea," he said, a wry grin spreading across his face. "That's a fairly common occurrence when you pull spinners. That fish just came in to take a look, but she was too full to chase it. There are bigger fish than that down there, though," he added, matter of factly, and went back to chewing gum and watching his sonar.

From the first moment I talked to Bill Craig, I knew the 43-year-old was a different breed of muskie fisherman. "If you come out with me, you're going to catch muskie," he told me on the phone last spring. "I think we have a good chance at getting a 40."

"Inches," I asked?

"Pounds," he deadpanned

A good chance at a 40-pound (18.2 kg) muskie? That type of confident response is unheard of among muskie anglers, but Bill Craig is not your average muskie angler. He breaks from traditional tactics, openly talks about his numerous trophy catches (some might say he brags), and isn't shy about letting fellow anglers know they're missing the boat when it comes to catching big fish. His confidence, though, is built on more than hot air and bravado. He's as excellent and dedicated a muskie hunter as I've ever shared a boat with, and in a field that attracts interesting people, he seems a perfect fit.

His hobbies include bow hunting for deer and teaching kids tae kwon do, for which he holds a black belt. He's also a dedicated and doting father. Last, but not least, he's cheated death.

"When I was a kid, my Uncle had a cottage near Castleford. I used to look at the muskie heads nailed to cedar trees and wonder what it was like to catch them. One day we got into a bunch of muskie and they just shattered our light bass lures. At 17, I finally landed my first muskie - a 26 pounder (11.8 kg). After that I pretty much put away the bass gear."

Craig worked a variety of jobs as a young man, but managed to fit in a lot of muskie fishing during his free time, mostly on the Ottawa River. Craig built quite a reputation as a hellraiser in his younger days. He admits to living a rough-and-tumble life in his twenties, but a tragic and unexpected event turned his world upside down.

"In August of 1986, while riding my Harley Davidson motorcycle, I was hit by a van," he explained. "It ran a light, and I flew through the windshield. At the hospital, I was clinically dead. There really was no reason for me to wake up. I just did." The accident left him disabled and unable to work at 31. He lost 30 pounds (which he's never gained back), became diabetic, and was in physiotherapy for years. His speech and memory were also affected, although it's not noticeable in everyday conversation. Today his wiry body is covered with scars, a testimony to the horrific nature of the accident. The personal cost of the accident has been great. The only bright side was that he recovered well enough to pursue his dream of catching world-record muskie.

While he's often in a lot of pain on the water, Craig is relentless in his pursuit of muskie. He's developed a series of patterns and techniques that are as unusual as they are effective. These days, he lives a fairly simple life, and that philosophy has spilled over into his muskie fishing. This is especially obvious when you examine his lure collection, or lack thereof.

"In the old days we used to use only Swim Whizz. That's all we could get. Then we found out about spinnerbaits, but they often snapped or broke on big fish," he said. "These days, I really only use two lures - the Fudally Reef Hawg and Hawg Spin. The 10-inch Reef Hawg's length and weight allows you to troll the bait, but it's really the way that it cracks and sucks in water that makes it so deadly. I've got one that's taken 35 fish, the best one 47 pounds (21.3 kg). The Hawg Spin is really my main lure, though."

Somewhere along the way, Craig discovered that trolling large safety-pin spinners just below the surface really turned on muskie, at least the giants he was after. However, he wasn't satisfied with any lure until he stumbled on the Hawg Spin, and even then, he felt the need to adjust the basic design. "I found with Mike Fudally's spinners that you had to bend the arm back so that the blades clatter together on the weighted head," he said. "When I sent the doctored baits back to Mike, he just couldn't believe that I was trolling with them. We were catching 25 to 30 fish on each of these big baits. Big bait, big fish, is something I believe in."

Craig is Zen-like about muskie fishing. He plays Springsteen in his truck to get "in the zone," and he chews Bazooka gum, a pack of which always resides in his tackle box. For good luck, he rubs his son's photo in a circular motion on his pant leg before the start of a troll and then props it up were he can see it all day. I'm pretty sure if he left that photo at home, he'd go back to get it.

Then there are the lures. Before Craig leaves the launch, he places about two dozen Hawg Spins in a straight line down the side of his boat. Sometimes they're arranged with blade shape as the principal concern, other times by colour, but they're always organized. Then he just gets out and puts in long hours on the water hunting for muskie.

"I asked an old-time muskie fisherman what his secret to success was and he told me 'get a nice comfortable seat and sit in it for 8 hours a day.' There's no sense being over-tense in the boat; just sit and relax and wait for it to happen," he related. Craig has caught most of his monster muskie by trolling. He's convinced it's the most consistent way to catch them, but like the man, his approach to trolling is unconventional. For starters, he picks areas and trolls them thoroughly, often working key spots for hours on end. While I fished with him, we spent most of our time on mid-river flats holding mooneye, a soft-finned forage. Craig would watch his depth finder for subtle breaks in the bottom. Even a tiny hump or drop was enough to hold a muskie.

"Most muskie fisherman troll in a static line, but I like to zig-zag and get those spinners rising and falling," he said. "I'll also take the rod out of the holders and pump the blades, bringing the bait forward sharply to get the skirt to breath. Muskie anglers argue a lot about boat speed, but it's not how fast you're trolling, it's where you're doing it."

During one memorable troll over about 15 feet (4.6 m) of water, something enormous clamped Craig's Hawg Spin right on the surface and laid his one-piece rod back like a palm tree in a hurricane. The power of the fish was incredible, and the reel clicker wheezed as Craig wrestled in vain to get the rod out of the holder. Finally, the pressure was to much and the 36-pound-test Dacron line jammed in the reel.

"No!" cried an excited Craig, but it was too late. The line snapped. "That fish was huge, it just wouldn't budge," he said, glumly. "Those are the ones you fish for a long time.

"I lost a world record in the Ottawa River. It only had one hook in its mouth and the waves were high. I tried to get her near the boat, but she just got off. It would have easily broken the 65-pound (29.6 kg) mark. The thing about muskie fishing is that if it can go wrong, it will. Expect the worst and pray for the best."

One of the most noticeable things about Craig is his animal instinct about muskie. He claims to be able to "feel when the fish are doing something different." If he's confident a fish is in the area, he'll work a spot for hours. One evening as we trolled a huge flat, Craig suddenly switched off the motor and said "Let's cast." It was an odd move for someone who is so dedicated to trolling, but he grabbed his rod and laid out an incredibly long throw. As soon as the plug hit the water, Craig started jerking the bait back with hard wrist snaps. On his third cast, a 43-inch (109 cm) muskie exploded on the lure. After a quick fight, Craig led the fish to the boat where I twisted the hooks free. "I had a feeling there was a muskie there," he said, and we went back to trolling.

"You can't set on these things," he said after settling down. "They hit so hard that they're either hooked or they're not. In fact, sometimes when I'm casting I close my eyes so I don't try and set on a fish that's following. I think a lot of people pull baits right out of a muskie's mouth. But you really don't see follows much out here. They're either on it or they're gone."

Craig and I fished a variety of spots on the Ottawa River, and what surprised me most about his choices was how nondescript most of them were. Most muskie anglers are keyed in on cover or structure, such as a rock hump sticking out of the water or a shoreline reed bed that edges a deep channel. Craig rarely casts to shoreline structure; he's far more likely to cast out over a 15-foot-deep flat in the middle of the river. He's convinced that locating big forage is the key to catching large muskie, and much of that forage is in mid-river.

"When the mooneye run up the river, the muskie are right behind them," he said. "Mooneye like to move in the evening and the muskie stick right to them. The mooneye average a foot or a foot and a half in length, so a big bait is important to match them. Mooneye come out of the channels into warm shallow bays, but they're not on structure, they're on flats. That's were the muskie will be. I think the biggest muskie hunt in packs and stay out of the weeds."

Craig's brazen confidence and his impressive catches have made him enemies in the muskie-fishing world. He says one Ottawa-area muskie angler called him a liar to his face, saying it was impossible to catch the number of big fish Craig has claimed in a system that's notoriously tough.

While a few hot-shot muskie "experts" don't believe his stories, his clients certainly do. Craig is a busy guide, and he's able to pick and choose clients. Two days before I arrived, he took a man and his son - both first-time muskie anglers - out for an evening troll. They landed and released two fish, both of them longer than 50 inches (127 cm) and in the low 40-pound (18.2 kg) range. I met the father and son over coffee one evening and they were still floating on air. Craig had hooked two more people on the sport.

"I'm not a group or gang kind of person," he said, though. "I don't join clubs. I like to do my own thing, but that usually includes fishing with someone else. I really like to try to show people who've never fished how to catch a muskie. That's my biggest thrill these days."

While Craig had always been a controversial figure in Ottawa's muskie-fishing fraternity, things reached a fever pitch in July of 1997, when he caught the live-release world-record muskie on the river.

"The night we caught the big one, the fish were insane. We got our first fish within five minutes and took a fish every 30 or 40 minutes after that. The third fish we landed was the big one. It measured 62 1/4 inches (158 cm) in length."

A week later, he caught a 65-inch (165 cm) fish that he says was so skinny, it looked like ABS piping. "I just couldn't see entering the fish after the other one, so I didn't even take a picture of it."

Craig took a lot of criticism over his live-release record muskie, not so much in regard to its size (it was clearly huge), but due to the way he was holding the fish in a photogtaph. The comments stung him, as he's always taken pride in being careful with fish.

"I was holding the fish horizontal for a picture, but the muskie flipped and hit me hard in the shoulder," he said. "I lost my grip and the fish went vertical. That's when Brad (his companion that day) took the picture. I never hold fish like that, in fact you won't find a single picture in my scrap book when the fish isn't cradled with two hands or in the water."

The hundreds of muskie photos he showed me all had him cradling fish. During the three days I spent with him, he efficiently unhooked, cradled, and released fish with a lack of chaos that's rare in a muskie boat. However, Craig is not a large man, and it's easy to see just how difficult it would be to handle a muskie as humungous as his record release. Considering that only one quick snapshot of the great fish was taken, he's lucky it turned out at all.

During my three days with Craig last July, we fished in difficult conditions, including a blow that put 6-foot swells on the Ottawa River and the fear of God into both of us. Despite the weather, we caught a half-dozen muskie, including a fat fish that would have exceeded 30 pounds (13.64 kg). We also lost several muskie, including Craig's line-snapper. I came away from my experience on the Ottawa with a renewed appreciation for the complexity and challenges of muskie fishing, but also a great respect for Bill Craig. He's the real deal folks, an honest-to-goodness muskie master.