Pike on Flathead Technique

I was on Lake Of The Woods this last Memorial Day weekend with a great group of guys from my church. We were primarily targeting walleyes, with a here-and-there side-bonus of pike. After we had some close encounters with WUS's (walleyes of unusual size), I ran into Baudette and picked up a dozen nice 5-8 inch sucker minnows. My plan was to rig them on smaller circle hooks and slowly drag bottom. You see, even on what may arguably be some of the finest walleye fishing in the US, I'm still just a catman at heart.

My plan didn't work so well on the walleyes, I just had smaller ones shredding my sucker without actually taking it. And others in the party were hooking up with nice fish with a simple jig and fathead minnow. So I abandoned the tactic, but left the suckers in the baitwell...just in case.

Towards evening, my self and my two boat partners were limited out on walleyes with several hours of daylight remaining, so Mark said we should go cast for some pike. For reasons I won't go into here, my bow-mount electric motor was unusable, so I decided to just let Mark and Malcom cast spoons and spinners while I stayed at the console, controlling a weedline drift with the outboard. Then I remembered the suckers and rigged up a classic (if downscaled) version of my favorite flathead float rig. A simple circle-hook under an inflated water balloon, with some sizable splitshot in between. I lip-hooked a 6" minnow and just flipped it out a ways from the boat.

While working the reed edge, a nice pike rolled on a buzzbait, but repeated casts with various lures yielded no results. As we drifted past, my boat mates shifted their attention to an upcoming turn in the weedline. I pitched back to the location that the pike rolled, as we drifted away from it. I set my rod down and backed the boat a few feet to control our drift. Within 30 seconds, my rod started to climb over the side of the boat. I looked up to see my balloon half submerged. Not knowing if I was on a weed, I simply started reeling with my rod tip pointed at the balloon. It quickly became apparent that there was a fish on. The circle hook had worked like a charm.

I was running a medium action rod, with 8 lbs test Trilene XL. There was no steel leader, the mono was tied directly to a 3/0 Gamakatsu circle hook. Luckily, as circle hooks are supposed to do, this particular toothy pike was hooked firmly in the corner of the mouth. When I got her in, she was a healthy, heavy 38 inches (about 17 lbs), my third biggest pike ever. As I released her, I reflected on how my catfish rigging experience had proven so useful in this situation. Often we get stuck in a rut as to how we think about certain fish species, when much of what we learn from one species can be applied to others.

If you've been following the articles this author has written, you doubtless have seen this at work in the fact that as an avid muskie and pike angler, I have brought insight and attitudes about those species into my catfishing arsenal. In this case, there was a bit of payback; with my catfishing skills helping to catch a nice pike.

I also wanted to include a picture of this incredibly nice 41 inch fish that one of my boat partners caught the next day. Mark was fishing with a lure designed and built by me when he hooked and landed this pig. Fifteen minutes before, he had hooked one that was a bit smaller, and we lost her and another of my original lures.