Louie Spray and the Fish of 10,000 Casts

Louie Spray was born when lightning struck a small island in Big Round Lake. He emerged from a cracked slab of granite fully grown. His eyes looked like peeled grapes and his knuckles were the size of wagon wheels. Louie Spray was a gambler, a moonshiner, a bootlegger and whipped Poseidons butt besides, but what he was born to do was to hunt the fearsome Muskellunge.

Louie Spray made a boat out of the side of a barn and strapped an old Civil War cannon to his hip like a pistol (all the muskie hunters back then packed heat). He used a white pine for a rod and a hangmans rope for his fishing line. He'd haul those black-eyed muskies out of the Chippewa Flowage, the only home of World Record muskellunge. These muskies were so big they dug new rivers as Louie drug them across the soft hills of Sawyer County, WI. Once all the fight had gone out of the monsters Louie would pull out his sidearm and put a cannonball in its head to finish it off.

Louie was always looking for the biggest meanest muskie there is, a fish by the name of Famous Dave. Rumor had it that Famous Dave was a three way cross: pig, shark and muskellunge. Famous Dave only came out on the real good muskie hunting days; overcast with a good surface ripple.

Well it so happened that there came a day that was so overcast and humid you had to hold your breath to walk outside. The surface of the Flowage was all crimped and rippled with the first gusts of a south-easterly summer storm -the same kind of storm that made the lightning that made Louie Spray. If ever there was a day to catch Famous D, this was it.