Bad Karma

We've had a bit of snow here and there in the past week, nothing really serious but it's been enough to hamper my travelling and force a change of direction in my fishing. I got the boat out on the big lake for the first time in nine months - a bit of a "shake down" trip as Denis calls them, a chance to iron out all those little niggles and assemble a different set of tackle. One big niggle was the old lighting board trouble. There's a gap in the market for a quality lighting board for boat owners that doesn't let you down every single year as mine have always done. I coupled up the boat and once again, not a single light worked and it was another hour or two before I could get under way after buying new bulbs, checking out connections and cleaning terminals.

First day out was reasonably fruitful in that I picked up five pike, albeit smallish ones, with two on deadbaits and three on lures. I had decided to concentrate on just one type of lure in order to give it a good trial - the new 9" Fox replicant. I've bought two of these, I used the "roach" pattern last week and took fish to just short of 19lbs and this week I wanted to catch on my other one, the perch pattern. Now apart from changing the tebles and split rings on these lures, something I always do, I had made another change to the roach pattern in cutting off the back hook. I had done this because I was using it on the river and chopping the back hook makes a lure less prone to snagging. On the lake however, there are virtually no snags and so I left the back hook on - something that turned out to be a mistake.

I picked up a couple of fish on the lure but found them a little difficult to unhook because the back hook on the lure is both very large and stands unusually proud of the body of the lure. It's rigged in such a way that the hook shank is close to the top of the lure body and so almost the entire bend is showing. This hook is at least a size 10/0, maybe larger and is much larger than the back hooks that were fitted to the original replicants.

The third fish I caught on the lure was a pike of around twelve pounds and I was horrified to see that the back hook on the lure had pierced the roof of the fishes mouth and come out through its eye. The pike will probably survive ok with just one eye, although its feeding will be hampered and it will probably not now grow as big as it might have but we really don't want to be in a position where we are disabling our quarry.

The action and the size of the lure is good, the quality of the plastic is spot on and it casts well so I will be using the new replicant some more but I will be cutting off that back hook from all the ones I buy from now on. I've put up a picture for you to see. The top lure in the pic is the one that caused the damage and underneath it you can see one of the original reps with a much smaller back hook. At the bottom the trio is made up with my other new rep, with its back hook snipped off.

I stayed for two more days but I'm afraid bad pike Karma struck after my incident with the lure and I caught nothing else. I did have a huge floating platform come past me though with a digger on it - well it was something to watch on a blank day.