11/27/16 Late Season Pike Action

On Sunday, I had just a few hours to sneak out and do some fishing. After some internal debate, I decided to head North and see if I could get into some late season Northern Pike. With Sunday being the last day of gun season as well as waterfowl and pheasant being in, I decided to grab my trusty orange hat just to be extra cautious. Turns out that was a good call as there were numerous hunters out and the sound of gunshots in different calibers was pretty persistent for the first hour or so of my trip. The fishing was nothing short of fabulous, the weather was decent, and the river was in perfect shape. After only a few minutes of casting I had my first swing and a miss from a decent fish. After missing another fish I was beginning to get frustrated. On my next cast after missing the second fish, I made a cast near a downed tree. I made a few jerks and thought I was hung up on a limb but all of a sudden the 'limb' was fighting back. My first fish of the day was an extremely fat, beautiful fish measuring out right at 30". It had totally engulfed my lure. So much so in fact, that I had to cut the back split ring to remove the back treble to get the fish unhooked. Even with the trouble I had getting it unhooked, that fish released well and after a short period of replacing hardware, I was fishing again. I caught another smaller but still nice fish shortly after. I headed upstream and had a somewhat slow period during which I had only 1 strike. I did however see a massive fish that probably would go close to 40". That always gets me excited. Before long I was nearly out of time and decided to return to the spots where I had action earlier in the day and fish for another 30 minutes before calling it quits. In 30 minutes I rattled off another 3 decent fish, bringing the total for the day to 6 fish in the boat and at least another half dozen chances. Not too shabby for the end of November!