Laura Schara: How I Caught Muskie Fever

Cover model Laura Schara, daughter of famed local outdoorsman Ron Schara, admits she has never actually caught a muskie. But she has come very close. On her blog for the TV show Due North Outdoors, which she co-hosts, she recounted her most recent attempt to land a “true water wolf.”

“My summer goal for 2008 was to catch a muskie for the very first time,” she wrote. Her coworker Travis, a Lake Minnetonka fishing guide, shared his secret formula—“bad weather = good muskie fishing”—and they headed out onto Lake Minnetonka during a morning rainstorm.

“I made my first few casts, and immediately there was movement and swirls in the water like sharks in a feeding frenzy,” she wrote. “I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be easy. What is all this nonsense about needing 10,000 casts to catch a muskie?’ ” Alas, she didn’t catch one, and spent the next four hours casting in vain. “My entire body was sore from casting such a large lure into the water,” Schara recalled. Tired and deflated, they decided to try one more spot.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to my lure when Travis yelled, ‘You have one following!’ I looked at my lure and there is ‘Jaws of Lake Minnetonka’ following it . . . his mouth was open so wide, a small dog could have crawled in it. . . . I set that hook so hard, the fish whipped its head left and then right, and to my disbelief my lure flew through the air and hit our cameraman on the boat. . . . Travis told me I had just lost a 55-inch muskie. Right then I realized I had missed a fish of a lifetime. Her reward for all that effort? “A fever . . . muskie fever.”