Pike

I had a tough time getting time to fish this spring and when I had the time I was faced with some tough conditions especially the due to weather.  Overall the weather was great this spring but as soon as I had some free time the weather would take a turn for the worse...not so this last trip.

The trip almost didn't happen but at the last minute John and I shuffled around our schedules and ended up with with some time for an early Sunday morning trip.  We met along the way at the usual spot we meet at when heading north at 4am and were on the water by first light although it was tough to tell since it was so foggy.  We had what I consider to be perfect fishing conditions; a dark, overcast day with just enough wind to put some ripples on the water.

We took off across the lake in the fog and darkness.  I hadn't fished this particular lake in a few years and once John stopped the boat I wasn't sure where we were at.  John assured me we were in a good spot and it only took me a few casts to prove him right.  We fished along a shallow point with some emergent grass that I could barely see in the dark.  A couple casts along the edge and I picked up this nice largemouth.  Once again on these pike excursions I was catching something other than the target species but I shouldn't complain too much.

We worked our way around the point to the shallow bay on the other side.  In a matter of a few minutes John hooked up and landed the first pike of the day.  It was a little guy but worthy of a picture because of our luck this year I thought it might be the only one we would see.  Thankfully that wasn't the case.

We worked our way along the bay and had pretty steady action.  I tried out a big chartreuse deer hair popper shown in a previous post and on the first cast caught my first pike on a topwater fly.  John switched over to a pretty cool yellow twin rabbit tail deerhair popper and had some good action on it also.  He kept with it for a good part of trip.  Not long after putting it on he had what he thought was the biggest pike of the day take a shot at it but he didn't hook up.

We had some more nice largemouths mixed in too.

Eventually the fog burned off and the skies cleared up.  We thought that the action might slow under the bright sun but it actually improved.  The subsurface flies we used had a lot of flash and really lit up in the bright sun.  The bigger pike started to turn on and we landed a couple of 26" fish and my personal best 30".

My goal this spring was to learn more about the local pike fishing.  I had a lot of fun doing it and it felt good to finally have some decent weather and fishing.  Between the 2 of us we put about 25 pike in the boat in about 5 hours.  I felt like I accomplished my goal and can move on to fishing for stripers this summer although it will be tempting to chase these guys around some more.  There's always the fall once the stripers are headed south again.