Targetting bigger pike

[Newt]

Newt, is the cray oil made of crays?

Mostly a neutral oil with a small amount of actual cray material added.

 

Note that it works nicely for carp as well. I drip a little on range cubes if the water has a decent cray population and they seem to enjoy it.

[Leon Roskilly]

Pike - wouldn't large live baits be more likely to produce good fish than dead baits?

 

Like most chase predators a pike is looking at something around 10% of it's bodyweight to be worth the effort of chasing, given that many chases will not succeed.

 

So a lure that creates an amount of fuss to attract the larger pike works better for the girls than a spinner that the jacks will be after.

 

(High frequency tends to attract the jacks, whilst a throb calls the bigger fish)

 

Note that it's not so much the size of the lure that is important, but the message that it sends.

 

However, bigger lures in general do tend to put out a different message to that put out by smaller lures.

 

That's probably why, until the advent of the big 'muskie' lures in the UK, the 'bass' lures that we were being sold caused lure fishing to be commonly regarded as a method only good for catching jacks.

 

Once the musky lures arrived, and some people started catching big pike using them, lure angling took off.

 

With regards to deadbaits, there is no 'chase' for the pike to calculate whether it's worth the effort or not.

 

Either the pike has followed a scent trail that says 'dead fish', but doesn't give any clue as to the size of the meal, or happens upon a dead fish as it just passes by.

 

In either case there is before the pike a morsel or feast, and if it's hungry it will eat whatever is there in front of it.

 

(Interestingly my pb at just over 26lbs came to a float fished sprat!)

 

And yet there are no rules that pike are aware of, so big pike will be caught on small spinners, and small jacks on whole herrings.

 

It's just that you have an edge when you stack the odds in your favour by learning why some things work most of the time, and others work now and again.