Key Fishing Patterns in March

Pike are attracted to moving water and move into creeks and rivers to spawn, often before ice is off the main lake. Any bay with a small creek running into the back is going to draw fish. Early on the pike hold off somewhere in the bay. Maybe they want to be within easy travel distance to the spawning area without actually being there. Foraging is still foremost in their miniature minds, but there’s also a subtle sexual stirring going on.

A famous spot like this is in Buffalo Bay, in the Manitoba portion of Lake of the Woods north of Warroad, Minnesota. The Reed River runs into the bay and attracts fish to the general vicinity. There’s nothing distinctive about the area—no weeds and just a giant shallow flat that runs 3 to 4 feet deep with an eventual drop-off into 11 feet of water a half-mile or so offshore. Anglers mostly spread tip-ups in the deeper water outside the drop-off. Most areas have more distinctive spots to concentrate pike.

Also check the points that lead into major bays—and it’s worth placing tip-ups along the edge of rockpiles in deeper water inside or at the mouth of spawning bays. These often are top spots early in March.

Barriers in Small Rivers

This fishing is mostly overlooked although it’s prime. The fish usually aren’t big. They are, however, the biggest pike available in these waters, because this is marginal pike habitat. It’s catfish water. The pike just get by. Most of the season the few fish that are available are so spread out you can’t find them. It’s only now when the fish are concentrated that you have a chance for some decent fishing.

As rivers open and flow increases, pike move upriver until they reach a barrier that stops them from going farther—or at least stops them for a bit. Most of the time this is a dam, but not always. A major shallow rocky riffle may stop some fish and congregate them in the hole below the riffle. I’ve also seen a variety of manmade barriers like old roadbeds and crumbling dams that cross small streams. We’re looking for any sort of impediment that stops some fish as they move upstream.

Of course, dams stop fish permanently and are the focal point for this fishing. I’ve seen small pike below small dams on tiny creeks that barely have water in them most summers. Tracing where these fish could have come from, through various tributary creeks off marginal rivers connected to major rivers, sometimes puts the hypothetical travels of these fish in the range of 50 miles or more. Managing Editor Dr. Rob Neumann had a pike in a tracking study he conducted in South Dakota that traveled about 100 river miles, including movements through lakes along the way.

Most of the dams that get some fish are fairly well known in their local area. Travel through eastern Iowa, for example, and you find at least a half-dozen small dams that offer this kind of fishing during March and April. The rivers there are connected to the Mississippi via one tributary or another. So it goes in other parts of Iowa and in other states. Some dams get some fishing pressure, many don’t. The fish often are there long before anyone realizes it. Folks begin to think about fishing in April, but the fish are there already in March most years.