When is the water too warm to fish for muskie?
The widely adopted ethical line is a surface temperature of about 26–27 °C (79–81 °F): above it, delayed post-release mortality climbs steeply even for fish that swim away strong. The mechanism is a double squeeze — warm water holds less oxygen exactly when the fish's metabolic oxygen demand after an exhausting fight is highest, and lactate recovery can take hours it cannot afford. A muskie that dies two days after a "successful" release is still a dead muskie in a fishery with maybe one adult per hectare. Serious muskie anglers put the rods away in a heat wave and target something else; that restraint is part of the culture, not an extra.
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This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
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