Our pike season starts on May 16, and if somehow possible, I try to spend a few hours fishing.
The day was cold and windy, pretty much the same as the entire spring so far… the water high and murky. To fish for pike in these conditions involves both a little insanity and much optimism. The pike are not very numerous, but the number of potential spots is endless. Being well hidden, some of these pikes grow to quite impressive dimensions.
So where do you fish when you don’t see anything?
The reason I know that there are pike in this trout-stream derives from my own catches in the past and from pikes I have seen – especially in fall, when the water is low and clear.
But pike move considerably between fall and spring, and so you have to pay attention to other details… as for example the injuries of a trout I recently caught. The cuts looked a bit like a pike bite, but I wasn’t 100% certain. Still, it was better than nothing, and I decided to fish the spot where I had caught this trout. Would the pike be there? Or had the weakended trout moved downstream and found a new shelter in the pool where I caught it?
Equipped with heavy pike gear and heavy doubts, I set off for the potential pike spot and started to cast a big streamer in suspicious eddies and let it drift past sunken trees and roots. As time went by, my doubts grew heavier: Maybe the injury wasn’t from a pike after all? And even if it was, did I fish slow and deep enough in the fast current? Was the size and color the right choice?
I changed streamers several times but ended up with the first one again, in which I trusted most…. the weather become windier, and I checked the time on my iphone. More than one and a half hours did I already cast more or less at the same spot, although I wasn’t even sure if there was a pike at all? In my mind, I was already heading home, there were so many other things I needed to do instead of wasting time fishing for nothing… only five more casts!… then, maybe ten casts later (thats how it often goes with the “last cast”), as the streamer was rising at the end of the drift… WHAMMM! like a lighting a huge pike almost breached the surface in an explosion of water as it engulfed the streamer. I was completely taken by surprise, shocked by the sudden attack which came with absolutely no warning. The first few headshakes of the pike had me praying that my hookset had been sufficent… The pike I had expected in regard to cuts of the injured trout was more like in the 80cm-range. This pike was way bigger!
To fight such a trouteating pike in fast, murky water is no easy task and you need some luck too! Everytime the pike made a charge towards the sunken trees and roots near the other bank, I had to pull tight in order to keep him away from anything where it could free itself from the hook. I prayed the tackle would hold, as nothing is more frustrating than a broken knot or a failing bite guard. As good as possible, I tried to keep the pike in the main current, in order to tire it. And it finally worked… as the pike slipped into my net, I cried out from joy. This is the biggest pike I caught in a while!
It measured 102cm and weighed a bit more than 9 kilograms, an excellent fish and a big surprise on an otherwise dreary day.