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| Message Subject: Muskies in Indian Lake (Ohio)? | |||
buckup |
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Posts: 51 | Fact or legend? My dad lives on the lake (we got 40 crappies this morning before the snow sent us to the dock) and there are lots of stories: Bass fishermen getting 20# mono or fluoro broken/cut, A 3 ft fish inhaling a crappie, just as it is released, Some type of big fish blowing up on baby ducks up in the north branch of the Miami inflow. Do any of you know of a muskie being caught in this lake? There are bazillions of shad in the lake, so it could support a population. Just curious. Edited by buckup 3/25/2014 3:44 PM | ||
| schleprock82 |
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Posts: 99 | A good friend of mine fishes bass tourneys every weekend there and he has never mentioned it. If there were muskie I'm sure he would have said something. Might be a good place to stock. Only 45 minutes from the house! | ||
| buckup |
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Posts: 51 | Thanks! You would have a fair amount of resistance to stocking, from both the saugeye and crappie crowds. It is a very low vis lake, less than a foot. How well would muskies do with that? | ||
| Ruddiger |
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Posts: 272 | Howdy, Grand Lake St. Marys has a small population of pike and, considering these watersheds are indirectly connected, it would not surprise me if there were some pike there as well. This would explain the "sightings". Take care, Ruddiger | ||
| buckup |
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Posts: 51 | Great point. Thanks! | ||
| schleprock82 |
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Posts: 99 | Ruddiger - 3/26/2014 1:16 PM Howdy, Grand Lake St. Marys has a small population of pike and, considering these watersheds are indirectly connected, it would not surprise me if there were some pike there as well. This would explain the "sightings". Take care, Ruddiger When I was a kid my grandparents ran Jack's Landing on Lake St. Mary's. One of the people that fished out of there actually caught a muskie in the early spring at the mouth of Little Chickasaw Creek. That is the only time I ever heard of one there. We are talking the early 70's. No idea where it would have come from. | ||
| bigfish44 |
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Posts: 41 | Interesting to see someone post something on here regarding muskies and Indian Lake, it brings back some fond memories growing up. The first fishing I did from a boat was with an older timer that lived next door to my parents. He fished Indian Lake a lot out of a 16' sea nymph. The first summer I fished with him, we'd catfish all night long using dead chubs and suckers for bait. Through summer we'd get a ton of small channels on shrimp and smaller baits, but as it got cold he started using bigger baits and we started catching bigger cats. By the end of October and we had got some big cats, up to 30 inches, which I thought was giant! So the weekend after he got the 30"er, I went down to Mad River to catch bait. I caught a dozen or so chubs and got a nice sucker, about 16". It was one of the bigger suckers I had caught at the time, I was proud of it:) I was also happy because the old man liked suckers better because they stayed on the hook better than chubs and we could get several baits from one fish. So when I got to his garage and was putting everything in his boat, I showed him the big sucker. He said great, and went to the back of the garage and got out a big old ugly 9' saltwater spinning rod and reel lined with Dacron line. He said he was going to use the sucker whole because sometimes the bigger fish liked bigger baits, which was odd because we normally cut them up in fillets. So we got to the lake right about dusk and he sure enough he grabbed that sucker and poked some holes in it with his old pocket knife and hooked it up with some home made, multi-hook rig that he made and tied it to that ugly a#@ 9' saltwater spinning rod with Dacron line. Back then it was the biggest rod I'd seen anyone fish with, it was a monster of a rod and reel, I made fun of him for bringing it. As the night went on, we moved a couple of times with nothing to show for it but a few small channels I caught on chubs. Every time we moved, I'd give him crap for casting the big a#$ sucker, using that giant rod. But after fishing Dunns Pond and the Lilly pads by the N. Fork, he decided to fish the shallow stump field towards the trailer park next to the Dream Bridge hole. We fished the area for awhile when he decided we needed to move. We were reeling in our lines to move when he started reeling in the sucker. He was reeling it in fast with the rod tip held high, he was saying how having that long rod helped him bring the bait in over the stumps. As he was reeling it in fast so it wouldn't get hung up on a stump, when something hammered it. I mean hammered! I can still remember the rod thumping back and forth and making all kinds of noises, sounded like an old tree falling, between the creaking and popping of the old rod and the Dacron line pulling against the old ceramic guides. I'd like to say the rod was doubled over, but it was so dang thick and stiff it was probably only bent to about 25 degrees. But the old man started to pull really hard when the rod snapped! It sounded like a starting pistol at a track meet. I ducked out of reflex and fearing for my life. But the last 10 inches or so of the rod broke off and his line went limp. He had tightened his drag all the way down because he didn't want a big one take him into the stumps. We both just looked at each other in amazement. He slowly started reeling in his line, he said something was on the end of it but wasn't pulling. When he got it in, it was that big old sucker, with two big 6/0 or 7/0 hooks hanging from the tail and belly and another in through the nose. That sucker, which had been in the water half the night, was ripped apart. Some of it was definitely from the hooks and his knife, but the rest of it was shredded by a fish. The old man just looked at me and said that it was a dang big fish that grabbed ahold of that sucker and he thought it was a muskie. He said his dad had caught a muskie back in the day at the mouth of the N. Fork and that he heard of a few others being caught there. At the time, he could of told me it was a shark. After seeing that big a$# sucker get hammered and that big freaking rod getting snapped. At the time I knew nothing about muskies and thought Indian Lake was a really big lake that had giant fish, so why not muskies. But as I started to read and learn more I realized the chance that was a muskie was slim to none. I've talked to a lot of people, fished bass club tourneys, saugeye tourneys and catfish tourneys on the lake and never heard anyone say a thing about muskies in there. Then one spring day, probably about 7 or 8 years after that fishing trip, I had plans to saugeye fish, so I stopped by Gene's baitshop to get some minnows. When I walked in I asked Gene if he had gotten any good reports when he shows me a polaroid of a muskie. I can still remember the picture, a middle aged pot-bellied guy, with bushy, untrimmed hair, a red flannel with the sleeves rolled up and holding the muskie with a vertical gill grab and a little blood trickling down the side of the muskie. At the time it was a giant, 45" female full of eggs. I immediately thought of when the old man had that sucker hammered?? Maybe it was a muskie that hammered that sucker?? But after talking to Gene for awhile, I went to Moundwood and was getting ready to launch my boat. There were two guys fishing from the docks and I noticed they had something big on a stringer. I walked over and sure enough, it was the guy in the picture and he had the muskie on the stringer. I talked to the guy for awhile and at first he told me he caught it right there off the docks on 8lb line and a 3" twister tail, but after he saw I was just amazed at the fish and didn't care how he caught it, he bragged how he was fishing for saugeye by the bridge upstream from the boat ramp and was standing next to the rip-rap where it created a little eddy. He said he saw the muskie come right up to the shore real lazily and he hurried up and snagged it. At the time I thought it sucked especially because the guy looked and sounded like an idiot, he killed it and on top of that he snagged it! Looking back now that I muskie fish and know how rare a fish like that is in Ohio, let alone in Indian Lake, makes me really sick to think about! I've fished there a lot since, and have lots of friends that fish there, and I've yet to hear of anything about a muskie, and that was probably 1992 or 1993. So who knows, maybe they are some in there and it's just no one fishes for them:)lol Edited by bigfish44 4/1/2014 11:44 PM | ||
| buckup |
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Posts: 51 | There is supposedly a group of guys, less than 10, that fish muskies, and don't discuss it with outsiders, on Indian Lake. I fish crappies with my dad at night 5 or 6 days a year there. I am going to take a muskie rig and a Top Raider and try it out. The lake is getting much clearer and the saugeye fisherman are getting weeds out in the middle, along with nice crappies. If weeds develop in the main basins, what a muskie fishery that lake would be! Skiers would be peeed. Nobody likes them anyway! | ||
| schleprock82 |
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Posts: 99 | buckup - 4/3/2014 12:18 PM There is supposedly a group of guys, less than 10, that fish muskies, and don't discuss it with outsiders, on Indian Lake. I fish crappies with my dad at night 5 or 6 days a year there. I am going to take a muskie rig and a Top Raider and try it out. The lake is getting much clearer and the saugeye fisherman are getting weeds out in the middle, along with nice crappies. If weeds develop in the main basins, what a muskie fishery that lake would be! Skiers would be peeed. Nobody likes them anyway! Very interesting!! | ||
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