John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
March 15th 2010
Piking Lessons
As you might have picked up on Kingfisher news, I had a great end to the season with a couple of super pike of twenty-five pounds and thirty-three pounds respectively. I think I partly got them because I have radically reassessed my approach to pike during the course of this long, hard, cold winter. I think, stupidly, I was beginning to underestimate my pike and treating them without the respect that they deserve.
Neill has long disapproved of my sunken float techniques, stressing my floats and weights were both too big for suspicious fish. Now, I guess he's right. Even the initial inertia of the bait runner is often enough, Neill says, to make a big, spooky fish drop bait.
Sink and draw is probably my favourite method and here, too, I'm becoming a lot more cautious. My approach to the water now is much more careful than it has been for a few years. I'm keeping low and I'm treading much more softly. I'm also working baits with a lot more care and a lot more imagination. It's easy to get into a routine that's pretty automatic and unthinking. But I'm beginning to realise that to catch big pike on a regular basis, you've got to give yourself every edge.
Years ago, the main Kingfisher Lake used to be the home of the Norfolk Fly Fishers. Occasionally, we were allowed to pike fish in the winter and all fish had to be removed to what are now Lily Lake and Willow Lake. What was fascinating was that once a big pike had been caught and transported, recapturing it in the future always proved to be the most difficult of tasks. Takes would be extraordinarily gentle. Dropped baits were very common. Sometimes there'd hardly be any indication of a pick-up at all until you reeled the bait in and found it slightly punctured.
These were lessons that I learned years and years ago when I really respected pike for the intelligent fish they actually are. There's no doubt in my mind that I probably wouldn't have caught these fine two fish at the back end if I hadn't remembered to treat them with the utmost of respect.