It’s fall and the month of October often yields the best pike fishing of the year. This is the time to get aggressive, use big noisy presentations and hunt out the best spots. It seems if you can find lush green weedbeds you will find pike and quite often they will be big. Close to home I like to fish Wabamun Lake, which has now gone catch and release. I chuck big flies, big plugs or spoons and the pike are there to greet me. One of the best tactics at this time of year is to twitch a big floating plug over healthy weedbeds. The pike like to sit in the weeds and quite often they’ll explode out of the water in ambush.
Suick jerkbaits are also great pike catchers and the seven inch size is my favourite. The bomber long A’s and the Rapala magnums, originals or husky jerks in natural and fire tiger colours will work great. Another method that may not result in as many hook ups but will provide some explosive action is chucking a surface bait like a Zara Spook and twitch it across the water.
It zigs and zags like a crazy thing and seems to get pike all riled up. Trouble is you will regularly miss strikes as pike go nuts trying to kill, drown or hammer the spook. The secret to hooking pike using top water baits is to keep doing what you’re doing, be it twitching or jerking no matter what splashy carnage is going on at the other end of the line. However when you feel solid weight it’s time to set the hook. If you can learn to do this you will definitely get more hook ups.
Lake Whitefish are the main item on the pike’s menu in the fall. Well over 50% of the pike I catch at this time of year have a whitefish tail sticking out of their throats. If you’re the angler that would love nothing better than to catch a 20 lb plus northern you need to go real big. Use the biggest herring you can find and hang it under a large float near those same weedbeds. Likewise, in low light periods big whitefish imitating lures will bring out the biggest pike. It’s during this golden time of autumn that I’ve caught a substantial percentage of my biggest pike and every year we get a handful pushing over forty inches with some measuring as much as three and a half feet.
Catching pike in fall is great fun and if there ever is a great time to catch a whopping big one; this is the time to do it.
