After last week’s strenuous coaching I decided to combine some more pole practice with a day’s pike fishing. My choice of venue was lake three at Twynersh which I know has a good head of pike and silver fish. This lake is usually quiet this time of year and it turned out I was sharing it with one other angler.
Where I chose to fish had a depth of between twelve and fourteen feet and I chose to fish on the drop off about nine metres from the bank. My intention was to start with the pole and try and catch some small roach for livebait but all I could catch was perch, skimmer bream and hybrids the latter two being too large for bait.
After a while I set up the pike rod and used a small perch as bait. Let me at this point explain the pike rig I use when fishing the pike rod as a secondary rod. I use a float paternoster to stop the bait towing the float around the swim, this means a sliding float on the surface with a lead of at least an ounce and a half on the bottom of the lake. In between is what the carp boys would call a helicopter rig revolving around a forty pound nylon covered wire as a back trace, in case the bait gets tangled around the main line as it is taken by the pike causing the pike to bite through the line. The snap tackle is attached to this revolving swivel which allows the livebait to swim around the main line without causing tangles.
This is cast into the periphery of my vision whilst watching the pole float and is designed to stay there, this way even when concentrating on the pole float I will still notice any movement of the pike float. The last thing I want is a deep hooked pike and this system seems to work well and resulted in one pike about six pounds. Later that afternoon I suffered a couple of dropped runs and as I was catching a succession of perch on the pole I suspected that big perch may be the culprit. Unlike pike, big perch will not tolerate any resistance when taking livebait and so the float paternoster rig was causing them to drop the bait.
I changed the pike rod to a small float with a single treble hook to ten pound wire on a free roving rig and the result was a bristling two and a half pound perch which fought extremely well despite the heavy pike rod.
A satisfying day’s fishing which left me with a sore wrist from handling the pole, this really is an effective method for fishing very deep water.
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