Six of the Best

Mobile at last and although it was rather windier than I would have liked, I just had to get the boat out for a two-day session. It's close to the end of the traditional pike season now and you can never be too sure what to expect. Some pike will have spawned by now for sure but others may not spawn for another month or even more. On a big water you can get both of these extremes as I found out last year.

It stayed fairly dry for my trip but the wind was a pain and at times it seriously restricted the amount of water I could fish. I hardly fished my usual swims at all but that's no bad thing as it means I'm forced to experiment a bit. In the end most of the fish i caught were from new areas and I'm glad to say I learned a few things.

Day 1 started slowly but at around 9.30 I had a nice fish of exactly 16lbs on a sardine. That was followed some time later by a 14.14 from a new swim. I went on to do a little trolling and had a terrific hit on a slow-trolled replicant that turned out to be a fin-perfect 14lb 3oz fish. I noticed that there were a lot of bait fish in the area where I caught this one and fished it for a while with deadbaits but nothing more came to my rods. One more came at the end of the day in another swim though, a four pound jack with ideas above its station. This took a whole mackerel and absolutely tore off with it, producing my fastest run of the season.

Day 2 was windier and a little slower with a twelve pounder early on before the wind forced me to take shelter. I moved over to the place I had caught on the troll on day one and found that the bait fish were still there. I also found several nice fish arches hanging just off the shoal of bait fish and dropped a marker on one of them. I anchored up and fished close to the marker and had a fish within minutes. It was only a ten pounder but that's the third occasion this season that I've caught by doing that and it's certainly something I'm going to do a lot more of in the future.

I finished the day with a 15lb 5oz pike which took a mackerel while the wind was really roaring. Not too bad really, six doubles with two of them over 15lbs. No biggie though!