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.

Taking one of the many fine fly-outs from Selwyn Lake a few years back, we courted big pike with many things. In-Fisherman Art Director Chuck Beasley caught some nice specimens on the biggest Lindy Tiger Tube, with white the best color that day. I continued to experiment, finally settling on 6-inch white Lunker City Salt Shakers—basically, shad bodies—presented on 3/8- to 1/2-ounce jigs. The combo was allowed to fall vertically along a break into 5 to 12 feet of water, and pike were hitting it on the drop, illuminating the fact that you can’t always depend on pike to be pike or to slash horizontal presentations with gusto whenever you want them to. That day, specimens over 40 inches obviously wanted fish flesh and they wanted it falling straight down. Can pike be selective, like trout? Not like trout, maybe, but patterns definitely hold up from one area to the next over the course of several days or a week.

In the middle to southern latitudes of the Far North, when faced with big, deep cabbage beds in places like North Knife Lake, the Churchill River, Lake of the Woods, and Rainy Lake during August when the fishing gets tough, I’ve relied on larger bass-sized spinnerbaits many times to get the job done. One of my favorites is the Hildebrandt Okeechobee Special, which sports a single size #7 willowleaf blade. Another favorite is a small muskie spinnerbait from Fudally called the Musky Candy Spin, a twin-Colorado model with a short, tight-angled arm. Spinnerbaits in those sizes are must-have items for the slime-covered toothies of the Far North.

Spinning blades, in general, maintain a universal appeal for Esox lucius. Smaller muskie bucktails, like the Lindy Musky Roller, can be amazingly effective at times, but don’t forget to pack a few without hair. Filming on Wollaston last year, our guide Rob “Crash” Wilson boated one big pike after another with a size #6 bare-bones Blue Fox Vibrax spinner. Though it’s still a good idea to pack a series of spoons like Dardevles from 3 inches up to 6 inches in length, spinners and spinnerbaits seem to consistently outproduce spoons these days, in terms of boating big pike. That could change at any time, because the effectiveness of spoons has been proven over time. But it’s the very effectiveness of spoons that creates the dilemma, conditioning more big, long-living pike with each passing year.

A lighter 1/2-ounce Cobra matched with a Jelly Hoo is still a big favorite of mine around cabbage beds. The cupped underside of a Cobra helps keep the package up in the weedtops, with the rod tip held high while being constantly snapped upward, reeling as the rod tip is dropped. I used this tactic at Misaw Lake many years ago, and it continues to entice big northerns whenever I find them in weeds.

Mann’s Jelly Hoo is a necessary ingredient, because it’s so incredibly flappy. Take lots, though, as big toothies tend to tear them up at a rapacious rate. Where the weeds get really dense, another must-have item becomes the Musky Innovations Chatterbait, basically a jig with a big blade on its face that makes the package rise. This bait wobbles and walks over the nastiest tangles of weeds and precipitates some monstrous, frothing boils. It produced some giant pike for us on Lake of the Woods last year.

Few lure types, however, seem so universally appealing to trophy pike as suspending minnowbaits. In waters where the biggest pike have seen it all, a Rapala H14 Husky Jerk is hard to beat. And that’s why the best hardbait to pack for big pike this year, bar none, should be the new Rapala X-Rap Xtreme Slashbait. A bait that transforms in an instant from wild, erratic, side-to-side action to motionless suspension is a lock. Something about suspending baits just drives big toothies nuts—probably the fact that they stall without rising or dropping, forcing following pike to make a decision to turn or strike. Filming with the Xtreme Slashbait on Wollaston last year, it produced the biggest pike of the trip—a fish that followed it to boatside, lunched it, and proceeded to throw water all over the camera, the cameraman, and everything else within 20 yards or so.

That’s why we go—to get impromptu showers from fish almost too big to handle and with a proclivity for hitting lures at our feet. We go to stare down a mythical 50-incher. But we also go to figure them out, when they’re being tough. It’s not that easy anymore, but the rewards are even better. To trick something that’s never been tricked isn’t much of a trick. But tricking a 50-incher that’s been around the block a few times is an accomplishment worth noting. To do it requires thought, and more finesse than ever before. This year, think about anything pike haven’t seen that should work, and pack it.

Up in the Northwest Territories and in Nunavut province, big pike stay shallow all summer and well into fall. If you want to chase big pike in open water, consider driving to places like Tobin Lake, Lake Winnipeg, Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods. On Rainy Lake, for instance, big pike often cruise the flats in 40- to 60-foot depths during summer. On windy, cloudy days they come up and take over the shallow reefs. One of the best methods to take them in both arenas is a big jig-plastic combo. I like the heavy 1- to 2-ounce Bait Rigs Cobra heads coupled with a 7-inch Reaper Tail or Mann’s Jelly Hoo. The best plastics don’t have action tails, which slow down the combo . The idea is to get it on bottom quick in 50 feet of water, and a straight tail facilitates that. When they come up on the reefs, suspending baits become the ticket.