The Pike Files: Episode 1
I have a complicated relationship with Northern Pike. Where I live, they are an invader. They are sharp-toothed gluttons that get introduced into beautiful Maine lakes by bucket biologists (read: peckerheads) that think that their actions can’t have huge ecological consequences. And once they are in, pike are there to stay. They eat anything and everything, and can quickly alter the fishing composition of an entire watershed. I should hate them and everything that they stand for, but I cant. I love catching pike. How could you not? They are vicious predators, they put a great bend in the rod, and they get huge compared to most freshwater fish that we have in Maine. They’re like a new stepdad that comes into your life and changes everything, but then at the same time lets you drink mountain dew as a 9 year old. You cant help but to love him, even if you put on a good scowl whenever his name gets mentioned. With pike, I’m that Dew crazed 9 year old. I want to catch big pike every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
The Maine fishing community has no idea what to do with our new Esox problem. If you ask six fishermen about how to manage the pike you will get six different answers. Some fishermen want them to be eradicated, even suggesting radical measures like chemical reclamation or gill netting special ops to remove them. Some of us worship the water pike swim in and think they are the best thing to happen to Maine since our independence from Massachusetts. I’m somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, I know that the pike are here to stay. The only difference between pike and most of the other non-native fish in Maine is that pike are the new kid in town. No one thinks about largemouth bass as an invasive, but the reality is that they were brought here in the 1800’s by some Europeans that presumably wanted to catch hogs on 7 inch senkos with the boys. Yet there is a part of me that wants to fight back against the pike, and at the very least limit their impact on our ecosystem.
The problem is that none of us can agree on what to do about pike, and that goes all the way up to the fisheries managers. The biologists have gone radio silent on the issue, other than posting some uninspiring signs near lakes telling you not to illegally stock fish. We fished a new pike lake this weekend, and while talking to an old timer who clearly knew the lake well, I asked him about the general sentiment toward pike in the area. He laughed, and said they weren’t sure what they should be doing. “We feed a few to the eagles, but the rest go back in”. That day we caught several pike and ended up releasing them all, including a 42 inch monster. I felt weird watching it swim off, and genuinely wondered if I was doing the right thing. For all I know, that pike could lay 500,000 eggs a year and eat a clean diet of wild brook trout and mallard ducklings. Even with that thought in my mind, the degenerate fisherman in me pictured that pike in two years at 40 pounds, and I couldn’t help but send it back down.
Rant over, time to put the soap box away and actually talk about how I fish for pike. While I don’t target pike nearly as much as stripers, trout, or even white perch, I do have a few thoughts on technique/gear that I’ll put into the fishing ether. First off, I don’t use wire. Pike have a reputation of being eating machines that will hit first and ask questions later. I disagree. There are a thousand videos out there of a pike swimming up to a struggling bait fish and just watching it. They might take 5 minutes to decide whether to hit it or not. There’s no reason that pike wouldn’t get wise to fishing pressure like any other type of fish, and I think using flourocarbon gives an edge over a solid black wire leader with a big old snap swivel at the end. I use 50# Seaguar, and I haven’t yet been snapped off. For hooks, I usually use an octopus style J hook in the 4/0 size class. The whole rig goes from a barrel swivel to 2 feet of flouro ending with the j hook. I’ll use one or two big splitshot, just enough to get the bait down. Then I store each rig in a sandwich bag for easy rigging. As for bait, I don’t really have a favorite. I’ll use whatever the bait shop has, and usually by this time of year that means suckers. The big golden shiners get harder to come by as the season goes on, and they never seem to stay in stock for long. The trick with suckers is to cut the fins off so they don’t spring the traps. They might do it a couple of times when you first put them down the hole, but after that they settle down and wont freak out until something toothy shows up. The guys next to us on Saturday were using 3 inch golden shiners and out fished us 4 to 1 on bass and pickerel. But the fish of the day hit a 10 inch sucker at high noon. I celebrated with a cold mountain dew.
-Grady
