Pike: handle them with care
I have done quite
a lot of pike fishing in my time.
I’ve caught them in many different places including Scotland and
Ireland, and for several years I fished for pike on Hornsea Mere in East
Yorkshire at least once a week from the start of October until the end
of February.
Usually I was accompanied on these trips by the late Ray Webb and occasionally
by other well-known anglers including Tag Barnes and Barrie Richards.
Though my pike catches were satisfactory, with three fish over the 20lb
mark and hundreds of fish over ten pounds, I tell you all this not to
boast, for there are many anglers with more and bigger pike than myself,
but to show that I have taken the sport seriously and learned a fair bit
about it.
In the past, and to some extent nowadays, some misguided anglers have
killed pike either deliberately or by careless handling for, believe it
or not, these fierce-looking pike with their sharp tooth filled jaws and
predatory habits make some people believe that they should be killed before
they wipe out the prey fish that they eat.
It is undoubtedly true that pike should be returned in good health to
the water after they have been carefully unhooked and kept wet for the
minimum time possible before being released.
You see, though sizable pike do eat a fair number of fish like roach and
bream and sometimes perch, they also love to kill and eat small pike that
we anglers call ‘Jacks’.
If you kill all or nearly all of the big pike in a water, especially where
they exist in trout reservoirs, say fish of ten pounds weight or more,
then you are almost certain to get an explosion of smaller pike in the
four or five-pound sizes with an even heavier total weight of pike than
before the big pike culls.
These smaller pike do far more harm to a fishery by reason of their sheer
numbers, and any fish that are too big for them to eat get badly damaged
by the Jack Pike.
I will concede that in a few unusual cases where a quite small stillwater
becomes overstocked with pike then the whole balance of the fish population
can be destroyed and perhaps in those rare cases culling of pike is justified.
Do please remember that before you fish for pike at all you must get advice
from expert pike anglers about how to unhook and return the fish properly.
I have seen too many inexperienced anglers kill pike because they were
scared to touch them, or had not got the proper unhooking forceps and
techniques.