Musky & Pike in South Dakota

Muskellunge and northern pike are the apex freshwater predators of the northern United States, and guiding for them is a specialist trade rather than a sideline. The musky industry is concentrated in Wisconsin and Minnesota, on the Chippewa Flowage, Lake Vermilion, Leech Lake, and the Saint Croix, and extends east through the Saint Lawrence River and the Thousand Islands of New York, south into the Ohio River valley reservoirs of Kentucky and West Virginia, and across the Great Lakes proper, where Green Bay and Lake Saint Clair produce some of the largest fish taken anywhere. Northern pike guiding runs broader and further north, on the boreal lakes of Minnesota and Maine and in Alaska. Musky earned the name the fish of ten thousand casts honestly, and a guided day is bought for the odds rather than the numbers: the boat, the heavy rods, a wall of oversized bucktails, gliders, and topwater baits, and a guide who knows which weed edges and rock bars hold fish in the current water temperature. The gear that matters most is the release equipment, since long-handled pliers, jaw spreaders, and an oversized cradle net are what let a fish that took twenty years to grow swim away. Most operations run full days, peak from late summer through a cold-water fall run, and are catch and release nearly without exception.