I’m not good at competition pike fishing, I’ve never been. Whole my life I’ve been targeting big pike in winter time. So different … But although I’m not good at it I really enjoy it. It’s a new challenge for me. That’s why I was really happy when I got an invitation to Pike Maniacs Elite. Only selected anglers got one because of limited number of boats at Pitsford Water. It was another opportunity to improve my pike fishing skills.
This time my team partner was Michal. We’ve already fished together a few times and it did work pretty well. This time the tactics had to be aligned with more complicated rules – there were 3 categories where a team could get points (up to 20 per category and day):
1. Number of pike
2. Top 5
3. Longest pike
So the maximum possible to get was 20 * 3 (categories) * 2 (days) = 120 points
We decided to try many different ways of fishing and lure sizes and figure out the best ones as soon as possible. Still during both days we planned to try smth completely different from time to time.
The biggest question was – where to start fishing? Should we go to the bigger lake and avoid the crowd or stay in the small one with most anglers.
We started on the small one surrounded with many boats. It wasn’t a terrible idea because we caught a few fish but some people had better results far from the crowded area. That’s why we decided to move away. It didn’t improve our fishing much but we still were able to catch pike here and there. At the end of the day we had 12 pike with the biggest one of 93 cm. We also lost huge one – way over 110+ cm – just next to the boat. We tried to land it twice but it was still to strong and was diving next to the landing net. This fish would probably give us the first place after the day one but we could complain – we finished second with 51 points. The leading team got full house with 60 points !
We started the second day exactly the same as the first one in the most popular area. It wasn’t the best choice because we couldn’t catch anything. So quite quickly we decided to move again. On the move we planned to try every promising spot. It paid off very quickly with 100 cm meter pike !
That was a good first fish of the day 🙂
We were not able to find any place where we could catch more than 1 or 2 pike which was a little bit disappointing but at least we were catching fish in a constant manner without long breaks. We also narrowed down our lures to middle size ones. Which was strange because many teams admitted they were catching fish only with small lures. I tried small ones a lot, especially the lure that was extremely effective 2 years ago on the same lake and I could catch anything with it. Across two days I had zero bites. I’ll never understand fish – why, when, what …
At the end of the day we already knew that we’re going to win it. The team that was leading after the first day had really bad fishing and the other teams had worse results than us. So we could relax and have fun with fishing. At the same time we were rooting for our friends in other teams to get to the podium … and they did. Our group of 3 teams took the whole podium 🙂
