Who doesn’t love getting struck by lightning?

It’s happened to me many times while I cast my way around northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Bolts of lightning have lit up my days while fishing for bass, walleyes and crappies.

And yet, I’m here today to write about lightning strikes – the most descriptive term I can imagine to describe out-of-nowhere attacks by muskies. They are sudden, startling and spectacular, always when I least expect them, and always exploding peace and tranquility into electrified mayhem.

Muskellunge, aka “muskies” to most anglers, are native to the Upper Ohio River and tributaries like the Mahoning and Shenango rivers, my angling stomping grounds. Despite the big-game reputation of muskies, I always point my efforts toward catching other species. In fact, I’d been fishing many years before I actually saw a real, live muskie.

On assignment in the early ’80s for a magazine feature about NE Ohio muskie fishing, I arranged to accompany Max Case, of Girard, on a trip to Berlin Reservoir. He’d recently experienced a phenomenal day at Berlin, raising nine strikes from leg-long muskies. His accomplishments with the legendary “fish of a thousand casts” were incomparable, the stuff of adventure articles in Outdoor Life and Field & Stream.

Case did produce a 42-inch muskie the day I joined him at Berlin, a perfect, barrel-belly specimen that crashed the oversized crankbait he trolled across a point in Berlin’s Mill Creek arm. It leaped several times, each time thrashing a shower of water that glistened in the sunlight like sparks from a lightning bolt.

That image is still vivid more than 40 years later, having been refreshed countless times by my own encounters with big muskies in our local lakes and rivers.

I stopped last week to think about all of the waters where I hooked and battled muskies, and their northern pike cousins. Interestingly, all of those fish were purely incidental to my pursuit of other game fish.

By far, my most numerous toothy-critter catches have happened at West Branch Reservoir. While pitching jigs to willow bushes, working poppers and buzzbaits over weedy points, and dragging plastic worms across stump flats, muskie strikes have lit up the day.

I recall one sunny morning when I boated three muskies in 20 minutes in the no-wake zone west of Rock Springs Road, which was two more than that day’s bass total.

Other waters producing big muskies for me include Milton, Pymatuning, Berlin, Shenango, Portage Lakes, Chautauqua, the Mahoning and Ohio rivers and Conneaut Creek. Alligator-like northern pike have found my lures frequently at Mosquito, Shenango and Evans Lake, site of the annual Muransky Companies Bass Classic.

One lightning strike I’ll certainly never forget happened last year on the Ohio River. It was only five minutes after my first cast that day with a Rebel Pop-R. I was expecting a smallmouth bass, known for spectacular surface strikes of their own. But I was completely unprepared when without a swirl of a warming, the water under my little popper erupted as a snaggle-toothed jaw burst through the surface and a fish of more than 40 inches leaped clear of the river.

I have lost count of the number of muskies and northern pike I’ve caught, but since that day in the early 1980s when I went to Berlin with Max Case, I have never deliberately fished for them.

Every catch nevertheless is another bolt of angling lightning. They make fishing so interesting, which after all is the reason I go to the water.

Jack Wollitz has written this column weekly since 1988. His next book, The Common Golfer, is scheduled to be published in 2026. He gets emails at jackbbaass@gmail.com.