Where To Go, What To Take

Cylinders of green fury trimmed in cream haunt me. They follow out of the deep, crash through pads and dense reeds, rip through deep cabbage, create heavy boils and deep wakes to turn, chase, and appear at boatside, their malignant gaze locked on some helpless lure. Their eyes seem to stare you down, but you are not their concern. The animal world is encapsulated in the approach, the silent glide of a bulky green ghost, poised to spring and dressed to kill.

Big pike often follow right to boatside—hence, the nightmares. Will it eat? Oh, dear. It ate. Everything. Right to the rod tip. Is this a hookset or a survival course? Water whips into your eyes in the maelstrom that ensues as you step back to brace yourself, only to find the curve of the bow with your foot and the drag set too tight for infighting. And those are the good days.

Big pike are commensurate with the North American wilderness, a saw-toothed symbol of the wild. Which is unfortunate. If people were better stewards of their surroundings, pike in excess of 20 pounds could be more common in places like Indiana and Iowa and would not be increasingly hard to find in Canada.

“One of the most difficult things to do, anymore, is to find consistent fishing for big pike,” lamented an industry editor at a recent fishing products show in Las Vegas. “Catching numbers of fish over 40 inches in a day is becoming increasingly rare, even in places where it seemed easy just a few years ago.”

How could that happen, way up beyond the roads? If you need an answer, it might be in the nearest mirror. Most of you who read this have been up there, in the rarified air of one of the world’s last remaining wilderness zones. And most have hooked a pike or two. The number of people flocking to the Far North to cash in on “untouched” fishing rises every year, and they’re touching a lot of fish.

If you’ve been to a lodge twice, chances are you’ve fished a lot of the same spots more than twice. I’ve been to lodges and returned five years later to play musical boats on the same familiar spots, taking turns in the hottest areas with the other guests. (If they time it right, you never see one another, and the guides hope it doesn’t come up over dinner.) The best fishing for numbers is typically a fly-out option, and that costs extra—somewhere between $200 and $1,200 per person per day, depending on distance and logistics involved. Typically, the main lake (the one the lodge is named for, in most cases) offers your best shot at a truly huge fish—the semi-mythical 50-inch pike (compare: “Thirty-Point Buck”). And it can be mighty tough out there no matter where you choose to go, especially in August. But if you plan on it being tough, fishing can be pretty darn good.

Why We Go

That it’s challenging to catch monsters consistently is reason enough to go. Implied, of course, is the hypothesis that monsters exist. The best fisheries are all catch-and-release, and most of the monsters caught last year are still in the system—a little wiser maybe, but still around. Compounding the challenge is the fact that pike can live in excess of 30 years in many of these environments, during which time they see the most common presentations many times over.

Some places stand the test of time. I’ve been to Nueltin a few times and it continues to offer world-class pike fishing, though apparently this was one of the first seasons in a long time that Nueltin did not put a 50-incher in the record books. Low water was the problem (though numbers of pike in the 47- to 49-inch range were recorded), but it didn’t seem to affect the lake-trout bite. Somebody at Nueltin bagged a 71-pounder last year, one of the largest lakers ever caught outside Great Bear Lake—which serves to suggest that the best lodges tend to have backup plans for other species.

But Nueltin also offers one of the most astounding experiences in all of pike fishing. It’s called Hearne Bay, named after famous Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne, who camped there one winter. The bay is a vast, shallow paradise of rock and weeds—a sight-fishing Nirvana for the flyrod angler seeking a lifetime-best pike. It’s bone-fishing for big toothy critters, as the boat is allowed to quietly drift across square miles of perfect habitat for spotting pike and for casting to sighted targets. The size of the average target is mind-boggling. Hearne Bay offers one of those experiences that stands out starkly in a lifetime of big-pike memories.

But even here, where a pike may wander for years without seeing a fly or a big spoon and might live in excess of 30 years, pressure has a cumulative effect. Hence the philosophy at a number of lodges in the Far North that fly-fishing with big bunny-strip leech imitations is not only the most entertaining but also the most effective approach. Leeches are food without a spine that can’t swim fast. What more do you need to know? Big leech imitations presented with a flyrod simply crush giant northerns in Nueltin.

At Wollaston Lake, where big pike seem to move quite a bit between seasonal habitats, guides informed us that smaller pike kept for shorelunch are often found brimful of leeches, when cleaned. Big pike commonly fall to bigger leech imitations stripped through the many boulder fields and sparse cabbage beds of Wollaston and many other big northern lakes, but that doesn’t mean a fly is the only way to imitate big leeches.

During my most recent visit to Misaw Lake, one of the most successful tactics we employed involved black 5- to 7-inch soft sticks like YUM Dingers, Lunker City Slug-Gos, and Yamamoto Senkos, all of which probably suggest big leeches to big northerns. Using only the hook for weight, we rigged the sticks on straight-shafted size 6/0 to 10/0 Owner hooks. The baits were allowed to drop along weededges or twitched slowly over rockpiles and boulder fields. Long casts were easy with 40-pound braided line on heavy spinning gear with large spools.

The same tackle presents 1/4 to 3/8-ounce bunny-strip Jensen Jigs, a tactic that absolutely smoked big gators for us in Kasba Lake. A jig tied with a 5- to 7-inch bunny-strip trailer is a natural leech imitation, but only when it isn’t allowed to drop too fast—thus, the small to medium jighead. Though white sometimes works quite well, brown and black bunny jigs tend to catch about 80 percent of the bigger fish, suggesting that these far northern pike are looking for leeches. Natural colors work best—a characteristic you’d expect to find in wary fish. Unlike the soft-stick approach, bunny jigs are designed for swimming. Keep the rod tip up and pull, nod, drop, and reel. Lift it slowly and try to keep it off bottom at the slowest possible pace.