--If a five-pound bass or walleye is the biggest fish you've ever caught, this is the summer to plan a muskellunge trip on Lake St. Clair -- where anglers have been routinely catching and releasing as many in a day as fishermen in other parts of the country catch in a season.

"It's been really good. I can't say it's been better than last year, which also was great, but it's at least as good. A lot of people are catching 10-20 fish a day, and if you get into double figures the chances are good that one of them is going to be a 50-incher," said Steve Jones, St. Clair's most experienced musky skipper, who runs the charter boat Predator.

"But what I'm really excited about is all the 30-38 inchers we're catching. I think we lost a lot of big fish when we had the VHS hit the lake a few years ago," he said of viral hemorrhagic septicemia. "Those smaller fish mean that we're going to have tremendous fishing for the next three or four years as they get big."

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Mike Pittiglio, who runs the charter boat Musky Mania, agreed that "we're catching amazing numbers; 10 to 20 a day is common. And while the 50s aren't the rule, we get them pretty regularly. ... Mid-July to August is when we start catching the real big fish. This year it should be nuts."

For most anglers, muskellunge fishing means chartering a boat run by professionals. Few bass or walleye fishermen carry the hundreds of lures necessary for muskellunge. Most of the pro captains I know have 500 to 1,000 big hardbaits and bucktails at a price of about $15 to $25 each, or an investment of about $10,000 to $20,000 in lures alone.

The bigger charter boats also carry more fishermen, which means that more lures can be put out at a time to cover more water. That's especially important on the Canadian side of the lake, where anglers are allowed two rods each (instead of three as in Michigan) and where you'll often find the best fishing. On the Ontario side of Lake St. Clair, two fishermen in a 20-footer are limited to four lures at a time, whereas four anglers who split a charter on a 35-footer with a captain and mate have the ability to troll out as many as 12 lures.

Detroit News / Detroit Free Press