Muskies typically don't feed by scent, that is true. Would it make the difference once in a great while? It might, but I've seen muskies swim right up and stare at a sucker, something that IS food, and STILL not eat it. As far as I am concerned, followers are just fish waiting to be coaxed into eating. In the case of double 10's? Of course something isn't right. It's a thing moving through the water that doesn't really move, look, sound, or act like anything they normally eat. Triggering that feeding reponse to me is just another piece of the "make this think look as real as possible" puzzle. When you make a rapid change in speed and direction, that's EXACTLY what a fleeing prey fish does in an attempt to escape, and it's that moment that usually causes the muskie to eat. Think about where they usually eat on the figure 8, high and on the outside. In the second or two prior to that, that lure has turned off like a bait fish would, sped up like a bait fish would, and headed torawrds the surface like a bait fish would. That's what fish DO when they are being pursued. At that moment, if that muskie wants to eat it has to commit, or that prey fish will escape. It's what they are conditioned to do, and it's what they have encountered their entire lives in the act of feeding. They see a prey fish that's close enough and either ambush it before it knows what hit it, or they chase it and it tries to escape, and they chase it down and eat it.

In nature, I doubt you will EVER see a fish being pursued that just swims along at the same speed and doesn't try to aviod being eaten, but that's exactly what we are doing reeling in a lure for 50 yards or more.

Think about where in the cast your muskies have been caught. Seems to me it's always right away or at the boat. Herbie is right -- they can swim in short bursts of spped at what, 40MPH? You can't reel that fast. If they want to eat that lure, they're going to crush it. If they haven't eaten it by the time you see them, chances are they aren't going to unless you make that appear more like food than it already does. The only way to do that is to make that lure do what everything else they've chased and eaten did.