Dipping a toe into the realm of super-pike

The only thing biting is the chill when Soldier Palmer joins a band of hypothermia-resistant fishermen for a fruitless morning on the lake

Pike fishermen are a breed apart. I didn’t realise this until recently, when I spent an entire day on the edge of an almost-frozen loch in the Scottish Borders. An ice-cold gale came bowling down the glen like a pack of wolves and our small stand seemed as if it had been built in a wind tunnel designed to purge every last kilojoule of human energy from the face of planet Earth.

Trapped motionless on the shore, there was no option but to wait it out and, as my companions laughed and poured more black coffee from a flask, I resigned myself to hypothermia. Several of these men had come up in a specially kitted-out Transit van from County Durham and it was their plan to remain on site for the entirety of the weekend. Three hours into joining them, I was ready to go home.

Rival species

I have always been a keen game fisherman, with a specific eye on trout. When I hear that a body of water contains pike, my usual reaction is to sigh with disappointment.

Trout and pike aren’t always mutually exclusive, but they don’t make good bedfellows. When they occur together, one normally prevails above the other and pike are usually the victors. There are some odd exceptions and the only pike I ever caught came a few seconds after I landed a nice little brown trout from the bottom pool of a waterfall near Gairloch in the west Highlands.

I’d slipped the little brownie back into the water and cast again around the back of a tall lump of stone. The strike came like lightning and my skinny little rod almost bent double upon itself. I seemed to have an enormous trout on the line, so

I was baffled to see the fish that had taken my little black fly emerge in a shimmering spray of green scales.

I never caught another pike in all the 20 years that followed and so there was ample time for this little

fish to become a legend in my imagination. Pike caught on the fly were akin to mythical heroes, but my one was a fluke.

When I got home, I looked for more advice and guidance on fishing for pike on the fly. There’s plenty of mileage in this niche branch of fishing, but it’s more common for pike to be pursued with specially adapted kit. When it comes to catching big pike in the depths of midwinter, there are no substitutes for wire traces, chunky floats and a great deal of patience.

Fishy legends

Legends of massive pike abound. Some fish are said to have been so enormous that they could never be landed and, when finally discovered dead in the shallows after 40 or 50 years of life, their mouths were more full of broken hooks than teeth.

It’s telling that these fish are always too badly decayed to be preserved or mounted. It’s almost as if their enormity guarantees a sense of mysticism and that once a fish reaches a certain size, it passes beyond our ability to record it. This is the realm of the 10ft pike and the legend of children that went missing as they paddled in the shadows.

I’d love to say these stories are pure nonsense, but part of me enjoys them too much to say they’re untrue. There cannot be many people who, dipping their toes in lakes or rivers on a summer’s day, did not tingle at the tantalising potential of an imminent attack.

Beneath these mythical super-pike, anglers can still hope to make contact with fish that, while smaller, still stretch the realms of the imagination. There is a pike mounted in a case above the fire in the pub near my house. It’s said to have weighed 40lb when it was hauled from the river in 1926, but it’s hard to believe that.

The specimen is so tatty and worn out that it looks like an ancient teabag and the stuffing has withered away from the head so that the teeth stand out like a horror mask. No matter how distorted it was by time and moderate taxidermy, this fish was a tangible reminder of what was really possible.

Unlike the mythical child-eating pike, this creature had really existed.

Thinking about this fish one night in the autumn as I polished off a pint, I got into conversation with a group of men from further down the bar. Their accents told me they were not local, but they were naturally cheery and up for some discussion on the subject of pike. It soon emerged that they came at least once a month through the winter to fish for pike.

I had never heard of deadbaiting, but it seemed to make sense that, as cold temperatures prevailed, pike were more likely to be found scavenging food where they could find it. However, as the men explained, deadbaiting leads to dead waiting. Winter fishing is based on an expectation of long hours and extreme patience, neither of which appealed to me. But photographs on their phones implied that patience was often rewarded with enormous fish. They offered to have me along for a day on their next trip and, hardly knowing what I was letting myself in for, I agreed with enthusiasm.

The day began in the dark. Duck whistled overhead in the gloom and I was far more attuned to the prospect of wildfowl than fish. The wind was cold, but I was clinging to the optimistic notion that it would be fine once we got started. I had deliberately overlooked the reality that ‘getting started’ meant sitting still for hours.

The lures were cast out into the gloom and each one gave a reassuring plop as it reached the terminus. I had not seen the bait, the hook, the weight or the float. I was handed the rod as a done deal. For a game fisherman, I felt slightly short-changed.

When I was little and before I had learned to cast, my father used to hook a fish for me then pass me the rod to play it. This felt similar, but casting is a smaller part of this business than the endless whip-andreplace of fly-fishing.

Missed opportunity

I had been advised to dress warmly and had done as well as I could in three layers of thermal underwear and a huge French army greatcoat. However, my companions took the insulation value of their clothing several tiers beyond my own efforts. Decked out in the latest gear, they slipped into zip-up bags that covered almost every part of their body.

I was ready to die by breakfast and there had only been one bite between five of us. When my float bobbed, the movement looked slack and drowsy. I was too slow to strike and had missed the only chance I would have all day. For whatever mysterious combination of reasons, the pike weren’t biting. We called a halt at 11am and I made my excuses. Gibbering with cold, I could hardly turn the ignition key of my truck. As I left, I heard laughter from the lakeside. They were enjoying the day and would return after visiting the town for chips and a cup of coffee.

With no assurance of any fish and pursued by the constant threat of hypothermia, they seemed to have chosen an odd way to spend their weekend. However, fieldsports can often seem bewildering to outsiders.

Knowing that one person’s junk is another one’s treasure, I was reassured by the feeling that I had seen enough with the big pike in a box above the fire in the pub.

“Winter fishing is based on long hours and patience”

The pike is often afforded legendary status, with tales of mythical 10ft super-specimens