Returning to Seattle from a trip to Lake Roosevelt with friends, I put in here for a couple hours of evening fishing. I set up a drift along the north shore from below the creek past the promontory rock to the west islands, casting bucktails over the weed beds in this area. The water level has risen from a month earlier, and the water is clearer, with visibility to a depth of six feet. I’m fishing under a blue sky. The air temperature is slightly cool. A strong breeze pushes my boat too fast to cover the area in one pass, so after completing the drift I’ll motor to the starting point and work the same area again. I have time for three passes before dark. This situation is tailor-made for experimenting with colors, switching lures on each pass. I begin with a bucktail in my favorite color. Next, I try black with a streak of my favorite color. Black is good in low light because of its silhouette against the sky. Muskies feed primarily by sight, so lure visibility is very important. I like bucktails with nickel blades because they produce a lot of flash in the water. For the final drift, I clip on a Mepps Giant Killer in chartreuse, with a willow leaf blade painted chartreuse. This lure runs deeper, and is a good color for stained lakes in northern Wisconsin, but I’d never used it in Washington. Chartreuse was the hot color for Lake Roosevelt’s smallies and walleyes this weekend, and who knows, maybe these tiger muskies are having a chartreuse day too. I have nothing to lose. The breeze pushes me closer to shore, and with the sun touching the horizon and its yellow rays slanting across the water, I make the last cast of the last drift. I throw too far and it splashes into two feet of water--and gets smashed! The musky instantly begins thrashing across the surface. I set the hooks twice and muscle him out of the weeds before he can dig in. He’s about 32 inches and 10 lbs, but my 7-foot bucktail rod with 30 lb. mono overpowers him, and two minutes later he’s next to the boat. Now he jumps completely out of the water, twisting in midair and savagely shaking his head from side to side, twelve inches away from my belt buckle. No hookset in the universe could have withstood this maneuver. A splash, and he’s gone. Muskies 1, Fisherman 0. So, there you have it. You’re not supposed to use this lure in clear water, and the water was too shallow, but there he was. In musky fishing, you play percentages, but there are no hard and fast rules. If the high-percentage methods aren’t paying off, it may pay to experiment. Muskies are unpredictable. Evergreen Reservoir’s tiger muskies are a new fishery, and no one is fishing for them. They are temporarily easy to catch, keeping in mind that in musky fishing "easy" is a relative term. In two trips and 10 hours of fishing here, I’ve gotten three hookups. Most places, I work for one hookup per 60 hours. This lake is a ground floor opportunity for people who want to catch a tiger musky and call themselves musky fishermen. It won’t last. Soon, Evergreen’s tiger muskies will get fishing pressure, see lures, be caught and released, and become very tough to fool. Get ‘em now, while you can. Bring bug repellant, because this place is full of mosquitoes even in September.

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