Originally Posted by steveparton

As an aged degenerate the one comment I will make is that if you go kill the things ( for to eat them ) weird Pro Pikeys will have a serious go at you in the FlyFishing Press .

I have suffered from such assaults for years - they are , if anything , actually worse than you'll get from a Bad Day on the Forum !

I sometimes get the feeling that one day a Pike Cracker will actually have a physical go at me - the light in the eyes can be very odd indeed - as it were !!

And yes , Pike are a byecatch for folks like me who fish deep for trout , and I've had numbers of seriously 'good' Pike days - none of which I actually wanted - and the odd one featuring wheelbarrows full really gets a bad press ! ( Despite the fact that they make seriously good fishcakes for Elderly Folks in Nursing Homes ! )

In all the years I've been watching Pikers who've paid good money out at Pitsford and Rutland I've never yet seen any one of them using a rudder and swing fishing to cover serious amounts of water - either with fly or ironmongery - and I think I've only actually seen two out of hundreds actually catch one . This seems odd to me - they go and anchor in the strangest places and then drift sprats or whatever underneath floats - and I assume that they think that everything I'm catching is a trout !!

Maybe we should actively go teach them modern boat technique - given that they seem to put the things back they should be catching more to make their days better !

The best day I know of that anybody had with Pike on the fly/lure was on a Northampton Trout Water and the tally at the day's end for two highly competent rudder fishermen came to 79 - to 32lb . Many took very large surface Muddlers fished flat out and waking !

At Blithfield Reservoir there is a select band of Pike only Fly Fishermen and they average one 40+ between the 6 of them per year ( it is the same fish btw and is now around 43lb and a few oz depending ! )

I reckon that if I were a serious Pike Fisherman the first thing to do is learn rudder technique and then combine that with fly gear or ironmongery depending on the day .

One thing I can confirm is that there are times when they will not bother me at all - and other days when they are a positive nuisance . For sure they switch on and off .

Best wishes

Steve P