Pike In Canada -- A Traveling Expert’s Top Pike Picks

“The mighty Luce or Pike is taken to be the tyrant, as the salmon is king, of the fresh waters” -From The Compleat Angler by Sir Izaak Walton

Pike are icons. “Picons,” if you will. Big pike are commensurate with the North American wilderness, saw-toothed symbols of the untamed. The animal world itself is encapsulated in the approach, the silent glide and menacing eye of a pike poised to spring, slavering to devour, dressed to kill.

So much of Canada is wilderness, and so much of it populated with wide-bodied cylinders of green fury, they should be on the flag. They live way far north of the last maple tree, and they’re a whole lot more fun on a hook and line. Especially those gators, those porky pike in excess of 20 pounds that 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. The eyes seem to stare you down, but you are not their concern.

Big pike often follow right to boatside. Like muskies. Hence the nightmares. Will it eat? More often than not, it won’t. Muskies didn’t follow when they were “fresh,” either. If you’ve ever been on one of those “forgotten” muskie lakes, stocked long ago when nobody was paying attention, you know this is true. Muskies bite at the end of long casts and rarely follow in such lakes. Until muskie hunters catch on. From that point on, and forever afterward, it seems, muskies follow.

Why is that? “One of the most difficult things to do, anymore, is to find consistent fishing for big pike,” lamented a rival editor at last year’s ICAST fishing-industry 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 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 the same spots more than twice. Return five years later and you’re playing musical boats on the same familiar spots, taking turns in the hottest areas with the other guests. (If they time it right, of course, 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).

But, 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 northern. And it can be mighty tough out there, especially in August, no matter where you choose to go. But, if you plan on it being tough, fishing can be pretty darn good.