Net gains: A morning checking muskie nets at Shabbona Lake

SHABBONA, Ill.–“How big? Anything near 50?” Pete Riedesel texted, wondering about muskies found Tuesday during the spring netting survey at Shabbona Lake.

Only 20 years ago, that would have been a laughable text from a fishing buddy. Come to think of it, 20 years ago I was not even emailing, let alone texting.

Speed and style of communication and size of muskies in Illinois have come a long way in two decades. Emphasis on long. When I started doing the outdoors for the Sun-Times, a 50-inch muskie in Illinois was the great quest. Since then, so many muskies of 50 inches or longer have been caught that I stopped tracking them years ago.

The new quest is 55 inches; or 40 pounds, a weight biologists have found during surveys but a weight never verified for a caught muskie. The closest to 55 inches, verified by a biologist, was the 54-inch muskie caught by Jim Hack on July 5, 2016, from a Lake County lake.

The Illinois record muskie remains 38 pounds, 8 ounces, caught April 20, 2002 by Matt Carmean while he was walleye fishing below the Lake Shelbyville dam. It was 50 3/4 inches.

That was the backdrop as the Illinois Department of Natural Resources boat pulled up to the first of 10 nets set on the shore of Shabbona on a drippy morning.

“That’s a pile,’’ biologist David Wyffels said.

That “pile’’ included 13 muskies. There was enough weight that Wyffels, fish tech Rick O’Neil and young Eric Rasmussen struggled to muscle the net into the boat.

Then they sorted fish–I noticed channel catfish, largemouth bass, bluegill, walleye, crappie, common carp and hybrid striped bass–and immediately threw everything but muskie back.

The muskie went into a trough. O’Neil and Rasmussen measured them, one at a time, on a bump board. Wyffels weighed, then released the muskie. Streams biologist Karen Rivera recorded data on each one.

Many big females dripped eggs. The biggest female measured 1,115 mm (43.9 inches) and weighed 14,680 grams (32.4 pounds).

OK, I will be honest. When Rich McElligott, one of the dedicated volunteers at Shabbona, invited me to observe from one of Lakeside’s pontoon boats, I was hoping they would pull up a 40-pounder. That’s a possibility at Shabbona, which has produced four Illinois records for muskie or tiger muskies.

On Tuesday, muskies starred, but the tangential fish in the nets included a hybrid striper of 5 or 6 pounds and lots of walleye of many sizes.

The walleye most impressed me. And that followed what Wyffels said they found the night before during electroshocking. He said they had close to 200 walleye per hour. The walleye had “good relative weights’’ and went to 24 inches.

But muskie lived up to their top billing.

“The muskie are good, right on par with other years,’’ Wyffels said. “Overall, very healthy populations right now.’’

Shad and white suckers are the primary food for muskies, but, as Wyffels noted, there’s “a smorgasbord of other things to feed on, other goodies to snack on.’’

Shabbona is the most intensely fished public lake in Illinois with primary species including crappie, muskie, walleye, bass and catfish.

“This is a great place to come and get a really, really good muskie or catch your first,’’ Wyffels said.