People ask me what my favorite fish is to pursue, and depending on the day I'll give a different answer. Lately, I can't get enough of the butterfly peacocks down in Florida. Sometimes it's striped bass. And not many activities beat casting flies to snook under docklights. But my first obsession over a gamefish started with the northern pike.
The pike is the first aggressive predatorial gamefish that I stalked and caught on my own. I remember catching my first one on the St. Lawrence River as a kid, rowing our little johnboat into a bay and using a Zebco rod to cast a yellow Head-On Midget River Runt fitted with two treble hooks. I can still feel that shudder of terror when a big pike slammed the lure, the dread of being connected to something dangerous, that actually pulled line off the reel. When I got it to the side of the boat, its trashing length and girth, the snapping teeth, it all left me shaking. I was hooked.
Now, I love to try to get them on the fly. I'll stand at the front of a johnboat all day in a freezing spring rain in hopes of catching them during the post-spawn. I've read books and articles about pursuing them with Dahlberg Divers and rabbit strip flies on floating line, but where we go we get the best results with perch patterns. Large patterns like Puglisi perch flies or big-eye deceivers with hues of green, orange, and black. We also get them on eat-me's, big clousers, simple baitfish patterns, barracuda flies--all fished with an intermediate or full sink line. (Where we fish for them, even when they're in shallow in the spring, they're still in six feet of water or so.) I am dying to work a shallow-water situation with floating line and a diver or even a popper on the surface.
