I’ll admit it. One of the facets of muskie angling that I find most challenging is boat control. I know where I WANT my boat to be in relation to cover and structure, and I know how fast I WANT my boat to be moving, but at times I find it hard to realize my personal “boat control vision” for a spot. High winds, strong current, wakes from water skiers and wake surfers all conspire to spoil our best-laid boat control plans. I can’t write a meaningful article about how to make your boat behave in such circumstances, but I CAN write about how fast your boat should be moving to ensure that you give your spots sufficient casting coverage.

The term “strike zone” gets a lot of use in fishing, so I want to make sure to define it in a way that we can use for the purposes of this article. A muskie’s strike zone is essentially the maximum range between a muskie and a prey item/lure for which that muskie will initiate stalking or strike behavior. If your lure is beyond a muskie’s strike zone, the muskie is very unlikely to chase or strike that lure. I firmly believe that this strike zone is mostly determined by the distance from which the muskie can see a prey item or lure. In that case, water clarity is going to play a significant role in determining a muskie’s strike zone. Clear water allows muskies to react from greater distances, while dark water situations (which might include presentations made at depth) would produce smaller muskie strike zones. It is also possible that a muskie’s strike zone could be related to the range at which the muskie can detect the vibrational profile of the prey or lure. In that case, the style of lure (“noisy” vs. “subtle”) might affect the size of the strike zone more than environmental conditions.

The muskie’s strike zone can certainly vary from day to day and hour to hour. It depends on the muskie’s level of activity. Active muskies will investigate potential prey from great distances, while inactive muskies are unlikely to react even when potential prey items move within inches of their mouth. So, when thinking about the size of the muskie’s strike zone, you either use data (you saw a muskie move from 10 feet away from your retrieved lure to strike it!) or you need to speculate (muskies are likely neutral because weather conditions are unsuitable for muskie predation). I suggest that negative muskies have strike zones in the 2-ft range, neutral muskies have strike zones of about 5 feet, and active muskies can have strike zones of perhaps 10 feet. These numbers may not align with your experience, so you’re welcome to adjust these ranges to your own taste!

Now let’s consider how you would search for muskies on a piece of structure using a casting presentation. Each cast should be viewed as producing a search zone for a muskie. The search zone covered by a cast should be thought of as having a width equal to the muskie’s strike zone on either side of the path that your lure follows during the retrieve. If the muskie’s strike zone is 5ft, your cast is searching for a muskie in a 10-foot-wide area: 5 feet to the right and 5 feet to the left of your line (the vertical span of the search area is controlled by your lure’s depth, of course). To cover water most efficiently, you want successive casts to land 10 feet apart. That way your search zones neither overlap (producing redundant searches) nor will there be any unsearched areas between your search zones.

To accomplish optimal cast spacing, you will need to move your boat continuously at the correct speed. But how far your boat moves between casts depends on how fast the boat is traveling AND the duration of each of your casts. There are a lot of factors at work here, and experienced muskie anglers have a sense about the speeds that work. Let’s assume we aren’t experienced and walk ourselves through how to determine the optimal boat speed for the most efficient muskie search pattern.

The duration of your retrieve will depend on how far you cast and how fast you retrieve. For instance, a long cast with a bucktail that you burn back to the boat might take less time to complete than even a very short cast with a slow-worked glide bait. The best way to figure out your cast duration is to just time it. Use the stopwatch on your phone! Start the stopwatch and set it at your feet where you can see it. Cast your lure out normally and glance down at the time on the stopwatch when your lure hits the water to note the time. Retrieve your lure. Bring it into whatever boatside maneuver you usually do, then cast it out again. When your lure hits the water a second time, look at the time on the stopwatch. Subtract those two times to determine your average cast duration in seconds of time.

To give some context to this entire procedure, let’s consider some typical boat speeds and how large a cast spacing and muskie strike zone they would imply for a 20-second-long cast.

At a boat speed of 0.6mph, a 20-second cast would produce a cast spacing of 17.6 feet, appropriate for an efficient search when the muskie’s strike zone is 8.8feet. At a boat speed of 1.0mph (which I’ve noticed muskie anglers using when they are in so-called “run and gun” mode), the cast spacing would be 29.4 feet, which is appropriate for an efficient search when the muskie’s strike zone is 14.7 feet. Those are some relatively large strike zones; in order to trigger a muskie you’re going to have to be lucky by randomly landing a cast close to one or you’re going to have to hope that muskies are active enough to be triggered from large distances. (Can anyone else hear Jay from the podcast doing his best Al Lindner impression: “Don’t let luck or feeling determine YOUR fishing success...”?)

So how do you determine how fast you should be moving your boat to be most efficient? To determine your optimal boat speed in miles per hour, use the following formula.

Boat speed = 2 x (strike zone) ÷ (cast duration) x 0.682

The factor of 0.682 is there just to convert over from feet per second to miles per hour.

As an example of how to use this formula, if you are speculating that muskies have a strike zone of 5 feet and your cast duration is 23s long, then you would calculate this by multiplying 2 times 5 feet divided by 23 seconds and then multiply the result by 0.682 to get the answer in miles per hour:

Boat speed = 2 x (5 ft) ÷ (23 seconds) x (0.682) = 0.297 mph

In this example, you’d set your trolling motor power to maintain a GPS speed of about 0.3mph (which is usually displayed on sonar unit).

Sometimes we don’t have complete control over our boat speed. In brisk winds or heavy current, the boat’s speed might be dictated to us by those factors rather than by our own boat control methods. If your boat is traveling faster than you’d like, you may simply have to shorten up your casts to do the most efficient search. You may not be covering quite as much water due to using shorter casts, but what water you ARE covering is being thoroughly searched. In such a situation, it is probably best to also be close to the most likely cover or structure that you think will be holding muskies. Long casts in high winds are a recipe for both inefficiency (widely separated search patterns) and frustration (wind-blown lures and backlashes). Keep your presentations tight and precise.

Note that if you are fishing with a partner, you may have to adjust your casting parameters so that both your baits have efficient search zones. If your partner is in the front of the boat casting a bucktail which they bring in to the boat in 15 seconds with a long cast, you may have to shorten up your casts if you’re using a more slow-moving dive-and-rise bait which could take 25 seconds to bring in with your standard-length cast. Shorten up your casts to match your partner’s cast duration, or have your partner lengthen their casts to match your cast duration.

Boat control is a crucial factor in muskie angling. The relation between your boat speed and your casting parameters is crucial for executing an efficient search for muskies. I hope this short article has given you some food for thought on how to make your boat speed work for you rather than against you.

Best of luck on the water!

Dr. Bob Musky 360