Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Look at the size of the bait this pike took!

Pike grabbed small walleye and wouldn't let go
Larry Tronrud holds up the northern pike that had clamped onto the little walleye in his other hand last summer at camp. The pike was never hooked; it just wouldn't open its mouth when Larry was reeling in the walleye.
Pike attacks on walleye being brought to the boat seem to be more and more frequent. For one thing, there just are so many more small walleye these days. Pike really like to prey on school fish and walleye fill the bill nicely.
Most of the time the larger predator will release the walleye when it sees the boat but once in awhile, such as above, it is really determined!
You might think that it would be a good idea to fish with large live bait in these areas for giant pike. You cannot use walleyes, of course; they are gamefish, but you can purchase large live sucker minnows, and I've known people who tried that. Alas, it doesn't seem to be very successful, at least not in the summer. Neither is dead bait, such as frozen ciscoes, which can work great in spring and fall.
So how would a pike angler target large northern pike in areas with lots of walleye?
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. If you leave a comment at the end of the blog I will be sure it is published.
My thoughts are to use deeper-diving artificial baits than normal for pike and troll or cast these in the fringe areas of the walleye spots. This might be an occasion to use slightly larger baits too. I don't want to say "large" because people always go overboard on lure size. However, an eight-inch Rapala or the like might work in these spots. That's normally too big to plug the shorelines all day with which is how we catch the vast majority of pike. However, when you know where there is an active walleye spot, you might just try trolling a bit farther away with the bigger lure and see what happens. Don't be surprised if you catch walleye anyway!

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan,

I have continued to use larger swim baits every year I have come up to Bow Narrows Camps. I started by using 5" swim baits/lures then the following year I threw 6" swim baits/lures, and this past summer I used nothing but 7" swim baits all week. I caught a number of small pike and walleye along with 12 northerns over 36"; not to mention a number of other larger fish that spit the hook. For this up coming year I purchased a 9" swim bait that I plan on occasional casting hoping that "the larger the lure the larger the fish" trend continues.
Tom

Unknown said...

Try using a large Brn/yellow suick. Cast out and let it sit a while before twitching it. Looks like an injured walleye.