Mark Windel’s Muskie Harasser was integral to a system of fishing for muskies as he imagined it—a grand, visionary departure from the tradition of sitting on a spot or two and casting until a muskie showed up. Fundamental to the system was covering lots of water. Fishing the most possible “fresh” water in a day put him in contact with more muskies, and more contact meant more strikes, more follows, more fish caught on figure 8s. It was all about more, more, more, faster, faster. Couldn’t be simpler. And couldn’t be more effective.
The system required aggressive boat control, rapid-fire casting, and a burning retrieve. In the early days, Windels didn’t use an electric trolling motor. He moved his boat along by backtrolling with his outboard and steering the tiller handle with his legs. To power a Harasser along at those speeds hour after hour, he needed a low gear-ratio power reel with a big spool to pick up line. The Abu Garcia Ambassadeur 7000 was the best tool for the job. He filled the reel with 36-pound Gudebrod Dacron, the superline of the day, and put it on a custom-made Thorne Bros. casting rod 7 feet long. The rod had a very short butt, which he dug into his stomach so he didn’t need to switch hands to cast and reel.
In-Fisherman Editor In Chief Doug Stange fished extensively with Windels and it was he who chronicled his system in the early days of In-Fisherman magazine. The Windels system changed my life. I’ve caught a ton of muskies and spent the better part of a lifetime going after this magnificent fish—because of In-Fisherman and Windels.
Which brings us to this fairly common, but I think quite tired critique of his system in more recent times: Fishing fast and hard—covering only a narrow slice of the water column, focusing on the horizontal rather than probing the vertical—produces peanut muskies. If you want to catch a monster, you have to slow down. You have to poke and probe, especially the deeper edges.
Nonsense. Fishing hundreds of acres instead of a couple dozen in a day puts you into numbers of shallow muskies that often are aggressive. You also are catching a representative sample of the muskie population, which is bound to include a size range from peanut to monster. Typically there are more peanuts in any population, so you’re bound to catch many of them. But the monsters also happen along, providing that you continue to cover more new water than the next guy.
An opposing approach, often aligned with legendary muskie guide Doug Johnson, is slow and methodical. Fish fewer spots, fewer acres, but fish them thoroughly, especially if those areas contain the kind of heavy weedgrowth where giant fish often hold. Obviously, that works too. Different strokes, for sure. But guess what? Johnson, top anglers like Tony Sworsky, and other friends of Johnson’s fished with Windels back in the early days and further helped to perfect the system.
