12/5/15 Starting December off with a Bang!

Throughout the week, Mike and I were kicking around ideas for where we wanted to go fishing on Saturday. We knew we wanted to fish for Pike. I suggested a river that I have fished in the past but never fished for Pike. The river supposedly has good Pike fishing and some bigger fish too. I had personally never caught a Pike out of this river, but Kelly had caught a small one two years ago and I have had my line broken several times while fishing for Smallmouth so I wanted to give it a go. With the cold weather in the morning we decided to meet up at 1pm and fish till dark. We set up a shuttle to fish a short section of the river from a bridge to a dam just downstream. I had only ever been on this section two times before so while I had a vague idea of what it was going to be like, I wasn't entirely sure. The river was much more off-color than I expected but still had plenty of visibility. We launched and I headed upstream to fish through a section that I remembered looked good from a  previous float while Mike headed downstream. I was throwing an X-Rap around good looking laydowns over deeper water. I didn't see anything for the first 10 or 15 minutes and I was beginning to wonder if we had made a mistake coming to fish this river. I was fishing an area where there was a shallow section just off the main river channel. It looked to be less than a foot deep with weeds and a mucky bottom. It dropped immediately from a foot of water into somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 feet of water. The break looked really good so I was casting straight up it and bringing my X-Rap down the river right along it. I made a cast and jerked my lure about 4 times when I felt the thump of a fish hitting the X-Rap. I set the hook and began to reel the fish in. It didn't seem to be putting up much of a fight if any and I was just basically bringing the fish straight to the boat. I thought for sure that this was going to be a small fish and probably not even a Pike at all. I was wrong on both counts. The fish neared the boat and much to my shock it was a Pike and a BIG Pike at that. I think at that moment the fish realized something was up too and the battle really truly began. The fish began making long, powerful runs and executed several massive head shakes. Before long though I had the fish subdued and had my Lucid grips on it's massive jaw. I made the mistake of paddling into the shallow area mentioned before to get out and handle unhooking and photographing the fish. When I got out of the kayak I immediately sunk up past my ankles into nasty, stinking muck. It was not very pleasant and made handling and getting pictures of the fish much less enjoyable. My bump board was not nearly long enough to get an accurate measurement of the fish so I put it next to my rod and measured it when I got home. From the end of my rod to my mark was approximately 37". This makes this my biggest Pike of the year and my second largest ever! As I was lifting the fish for the first picture, Mike peddled around the corner. He said something to the effect of "oh what the hell?!?!". He was nice enough to snap some pictures for me and before long I released the fish. Pretty sweet! My first Pike from this river was my biggest of the year! The other unfortunate thing was that even though I had my GoPro on my head during the battle, I had somehow forgot to turn it on! No footage of my biggest Pike of the year :( At least I got some decent pictures and a sweet memory. The rest of the day was much slower but I had chances at several more fish without connecting. When we reached the pond created by the dam, I caught 3 more Pike in the span of 5 minutes. The biggest was probably somewhere around 20 inches. Mike caught one small hammer handle as well. My first impression of Pike fishing this river is very good and I already have other sections of this river on my 'to-do-list' for next spring.