BAIT TRICKS FOR WINTER PIKE
Small tweaks can make all the difference when targeting lethargic predators
THIS is my favourite time of the year to go pike fishing, but the combination of low water temperatures and the pike often being well-fed can make for some tricky sport.
If you’re suffering from dropped runs or lightly hooked fish, I don’t think it’s a case of the fish wising up – it’s more that they’re just not feeding very actively. Even though we think of pike as being a cold-water species, their metabolism slows down as the temperature plummets. In autumn, pike need to feed every couple of days, whereas right now it can be once a fortnight.
Between active feeding times we can still catch pike, but it can mean using a few tricks to get that all-important run.
WHY BUOYANCY MATTERS
One thing you can do right now is to use slow-sinking baits, especially if you’re legering and fishing on the bottom. Pike suck baits in from a few centimetres away as they struggle to pick a bait up off the deck.
In autumn this is rarely a problem, as they are quite active and so take the bait well. In the cold they pick up a bait with less gusto and so it can be missed, or end up right on the tip of the snout with the hooks not positioned correctly. If you’re getting dropped runs or finding baits with teeth marks in them, it’s a sign this is happening.
This problem can be easily resolved just by switching to a balanced or popped-up bait. If I want the bait to be critically balanced but lying flat on the bottom I add a small piece of rig foam between the two trebles, held in place with mini zip ties.
To get the bait to sit head up, tail down, I attach a small Bait Popper to the bottom treble with wire. Make sure your baits are defrosted before checking their buoyancy, though, as frozen baits will often float.
DO THE TWITCH!
Have you ever picked up your rod to wind in, only to have it almost wrenched out of your hand as a pike takes the bait?
This happens a lot, as unresponsive pike will often sit and look at a bait for hours on end. Twitching the bait just a few centimetres gives it that added incentive to take the bait before it disappears, and can often bring an instant response.
An alternative is to add some movement to the deadbait. One sneaky and underused way of doing this is to add a few worms to the treble hooks. It sounds strange, but it can really work!
MAXIMUM ATTRACTION
Pike don’t have the most highly-developed sense of smell, but there’s no doubt that
they can hunt down the scent of a bait. I like to enhance this by puncturing baits, or chopping the head off just behind the gills to let out the body fluids. This is especially important if you’re recasting baits, because they can become washed out over time.
Injecting fish oil just under the skin of the baits or rolling them in a light coating of oil will boost the smell.
I also like to chop any used baits into small pieces that won’t fill up the pike, and I catapult
these out around the floats.
Another great tactic, especially on rivers where the scent trail can travel quickly downstream, is to fill a swimfeeder with finely diced fish. Side-by-side tests of rods fished with a swimfeeder against ones with just a lead have resulted in up to twice as many fish on the boosted rod.
NEXT WEEK
How to create hi-attract single hookbaits for carp