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Finding A New Affection For Pike
By Howell Raines
ELY, Minn. -- For the third year in
a row, my sons and I ventured into the wilderness lakes north of this town
with our fly rods and with our hearts free of suspicion that anything would
come between us and our beloved smallmouth bass. Enter the northern pike,
the barracuda of the inland seas, a fish sometimes maligned for the boniness
of its flesh and its tendency to swim sluggishly toward the boat when hooked
on conventional tackle.
Northern pike on four-weight fly rods are
another matter.
My theory is that the traditional lures for pike - spinners, spoons, or
plugs with big treble hooks - give the fish such a big uncomfortable mouth
full of foreign objects that they just give up; sort of like a human being
in a dentists chair. On the other hand, being hooked lightly by the single
thin hook of a streamer fly seems to irritate these fish no end. It
certainly makes them bloody minded. Several times we had pike come unhooked
after lengthy fights and then come back to strike the fly a second time.
There have been a number of articles lately in the sporting magazines about
the northern pike as a good fly rod fish. I hadn't taken the articles too
seriously until our first day at Carp Lake, just across the Canadian border
from Minnesota in the Quetico Provincial Park.
My 19-year-old son, Jeffrey, and I were
prospecting for spawning smallmouth when he struck a pike of five pounds or
so. It made a spectacular, bonefish-like run across a shallow flat, then
sped back to the canoe, wrapped the leader around an anchor line and broke
off. Later, Jeffrey took another pike of the same size that showed us a
series of thrashing surface runs in sea-serpent style. Our afternoon ended
in a flurry of severed leaders along a quarter-mile stretch of bank where
big fish rocketed out of sunken tree tops to smash our flies and then bored
back into their tangled lairs.
After the first day we got a little more
skillful at fighting this fish into open water. We also added short shock
tippets of 40-pound mono to the ends of our leaders. This protection against
the pike's sharp teeth ended most -- but alas not all -- of our cutoffs.
As for our flies, any brightly colored
streamer will do. In these situations, however, I stick with what I think of
as The Best Wet Fly Ever Invented. Its official name is the Clouser Deep
Minnow. Since its invention several years ago by Bob Clouser, the
self-effacing proprietor of Clouser's Fly Shop in Middletown, Pa., this fly
has become a standard in the fly-fishing catalogs. It has been used to take
virtually every species of fresh and saltwater game fish in North America.
My son Ben, 21, ties his own Clouser Minnows. One morning, he set up his
fly-tying vice in camp and made several minnows in nuclear-reactor colors of
fluorescent pink and orange. It seemed clear we were on to something when
Jeffrey hooked a smallmouth bass on one of these garish productions and a
pike attacked the hooked fish in an attempt to get the fly from its mouth.
Let us speak of the obligatory
One-That-Got-Away. Ben hung his fly one morning on a sunken pine top, and
when I paddled the canoe over to retrieve it, we spooked a large pike.
Several hours later, I cast to the exact same place. I watched my fly sink
in the clear water. I gave it a short jerk. Then the fly disappeared from
sight. I set the hook, hitting firm resistance, then nothing. The pike had
bitten through my shock tippet. I had done everything right and lost the
fish. Books on the sport urge us to remember at such moments that if we
never lost a fish, there would be no thrill to catching any fish. It is this
kind of thinking that reminds us that fly fishing has produced relatively
few great philosophers.
Our outfitter, John Schiefelbein of North
Country Canoe Outfitters in Ely (800-552-5581), had recommended, and mapped
us into, Carp Lake for smallmouth bass, rather than pike. And indeed, there
was excellent bass fishing. Schiefelbein strongly urges his clients to
practice catch-and-release fishing in spring. I have long favored pike over
bass as an eating fish. I feel like a heretic to say it, but pike might
become a favorite catching fish as well. |
