A dream trip to a Canadian gator factory revealed how to catch more pike everywhere
By: Ryan Gilligan
I was swimming a jig the size of a housecat
and the color of peppermint candy,
but it disappeared in gin-clear water a
foot off the gunnel like it had been
swallowed by a black hole.
It might as well have been.
My eyes adjusted to the glare in time to
see the cinder block-size head of a giant pike
wheel to my right. A second later I was holding
a straightened leader snap between my fingers,
trembling with adrenaline, seething with frustration,
but mostly smiling in disbelief that
places like this still exist.
I'd spent most of the previous day climbing
aboard progressively smaller airplanes and crawling
back out in strange new places my ascent north
evident by the ground crews changing accents.
By the time the landing gear touched concrete
in an outpost town called La Ronge,
Saskatchewan, I was in a twin-prop barely tall
enough to kneel in, and I no longer even recognized
the language of some of the folks who
grabbed the luggage.
After crawling out of the passenger compartment,
I piled into a truck and headed even farther
north, dodging the occasional 18-wheeler
and vainly trying to develop a taste for the
radio's only program, the Aboriginal Radio
Network's Top 30 Countdown (imagine
Michael Bolton singing in Cree). Three hours
later, I reached the literal end of the road at the
south shore of vast Reindeer Lake in the north-eastern corner of the province.
It was now 12 hours later,
and I was fishing aside Lawrence
Bay Lodge guide Vic Jobb, a
keg-shaped Cree Indian with a
sense of humor wry enough to
dry wet boots. His English is
comprised of more four-letter
words than hip fishing lingo,
but he knows pike. The halfdozen
giants I'd seen in the first
few minutes of fishing including
the gator that had just mangled
my leader were proof.
Considering the type of exposure
most far-north pike fishing
gets through the media, I can
guess what you're probably
thinking: This all took place
shortly after ice-out in June,
when we caught fish in shallow,
muck-bottom bays and sightfished
soft jerkbaits to lethargic
giants. Old news.
If that's what this were about,
I wouldn't be wasting your time.
Truth is, the calendar said we
were on the far side of August,
and the golden birch leaves
screamed that serious autumn
was close behind. It's not a time
of year most anglers shoot for
when planning Canadian pike
trips but you can find and catch huge pikeif
you make the necessary tweaks.
And those tweaks don't only
apply to the subarctic you can
also take them to the bank when
fishing near-home pike waters in
the U.S. and southern Canada.
Decoding The Pike Calendar
Reindeer Lake spills out across
a swath of northern Saskatchewan
and Manitoba roughly the
size of Rhode Island and
Delaware combined about
2,000,000 acres. Its characteristics and
short open-water season make it a unique
window into pike behavior transitions.
The lake's sprawling basin is feathered
by countless cookie-cutter bays,
most of which feature muck bottoms at
their backs, with scattered sunken wood that concentrates fish at ice-out. These
skinny water areas slide into deeper,
harder-bottomed areas as you move
toward the main basin, where cabbage
weedbeds set up in July. Off the deep
weedline, near the mouth of the coves,
you'll usually find rock reefs and points before the bottom drops out
into the main basin.
Many of the bays function as
lakes onto themselves, with resident
brutes that use the various
cover and structure in predictable
ways according to the
season. Although the transitions
progress more rapidly because
of Reindeer's high latitude and
short summer, the same types
of movements also occur on
lakes near you.
As water temperatures warm
and weeds develop, pike begin
moving out toward the mainlake
ends of spawning bays,
where they set up shop on
weedbeds and pockets, says
Lawrence Bay Lodge operator
Phil Engen. Once there, they'll
more or less stay put through
late summer, then move deeper
in October, then return to the
bays after ice-up.
True to form, during my late-
August trip, big pike were cruising
deep weedlines in eight to
12 feet of water, holding at or
slightly below the weedtops.
Late August is a transition
time here, and so you'll sometimes
find fish in a variety of
different areas, he says. On
sunny days they'll generally be
in the weedbeds, whereas on
cloudy days you'll find more
and bigger fish suspended off
adjacent rocks.
Wind is another key.
You'll definitely catch a lot
more pike in bays and off points
with the wind blowing into
them, Engen says. The point
was echoed by Jobb, who would
frequently run past prime structure
and cover to fish a bay that
had been pounded by wind the
previous few days.
Lawrence Bay Lodge | | |
