Spring vs. mid summer & fall

[Alan]

Do the larger pike tend to bite more in the spring, summer or fall? Can I target them after the opener? Or should I target smaller pike?

[Mike Stark]

what i hear is that the big girls are fairly easy to catch before they spawn. they are feeding heavily and are up shallow. during and right after spawn fishing can be tough. spring time is big pike time.

mike

[redhooks]

Spring and fall tend to be more productive because big fish can be found in shallower depths. When the water warms up I think the big pike go deep and are harder to target. As far targeting monsters you never know unless you try it and my grampa always said "Big Bait for Big Fish". The biggest pike I've seen are right after opener and while trolling during deer season.

redhooks

[Neighbor_guy]

I agree big bait big fish. And I second the spring and fall paterns. Spring because they are getting into warmer water. Fall because of the feed bag thing. But they can be found in the summer too. It just means looking harder and covering the right water.

[Steve Foss]

I've had most of my luck on larger fish during mid summer because warmer water can be ruled out as a location. Unless the lake has coldwater shallow springs or some other coldwater flow coming in, the bigger girls are going to be around 20 feet or deeper, and that eliminates a lot of water.

I troll middle-sized deep diving minnowbaits around 20 feet down near main lake points and sunken islands and humps (or off the deep weedline edge), and bounce jigs tipped with sucker minnows off bottom structure in 20 to 30 FOW.

Fall pike tend to run heavier because of the feedbag but can be scattered widely through shallower areas and are mixed in with other smaller pike.

These comments are basically aimed at smaller to mid-size lakes. The monsters like Vermilion, Cass, Mille Lacs, Leech and LOW offer some different options, particularly in fall but also in summer because they have large bases of open-water cold-loving schooling forage like cisco.

[cjac]

Hey all,

It could be quite interesting this year with this lingering winter and late arriving Spring. I'll be looking to dark bottom, North and Northwest bays come opener, as they get the most sunlight and will warm faster. Even in Central Minn, this may hold true, but especially up North with the late ice off. If not there, then I'll look to adjacent weed flats, especially cabbage, to these bays/basins. It's worked wonderfully in Canada before....

Summer, they move deeper and cooler. One trick is to look to shallower lakes with decent pike populations. Like stcatfish said, they'll be in deeper and cooler water where it's available. Smaller and shallower lakes cut down that search time greatly, you can look at a map and find the best places to target pretty easily.

Fall: I love the Fall fishing in general, great time for pike. A red-tail chub on a jig worked down a break can produce big fish of any species, always a surprise! Fall also helps us out by leading us to remaining green vegetation. Either by sight of with a crank, the green stuff can be pretty easily found. Green weeds in the Fall equals fish, simple as that. Find remaining green stuff on Mille Lacs in Twin, Wahkon, or Vineland bays and you have a legitimate chance at a 40" pike. Quite honestly, since Mille is a wind-swept soup bowl that doesn't stratisy, that weed pattern will hold true all summer too!

I just hope I'm not breaking ice off the eyelets come opener.....

[Nick Kuhn]

OK, so let's make things more interesting. This reading was taken on a July day last year on a small shallow lake.

 Code:

07/24/2007
Depth	  Temp.	        D.O.
FEET	DEGREES F	MG/L
0	  81.6	
3	  78.4	         5
6	  73.9	
9	  73.2	         5
12	  72.6	         4
15	  72.3	         3
18	  70.8	         2
21	  69.6	
24	  67.4	         1
25	  64.7	         1

So in an ideal world fish would be hanging out in the deepest parts of the lake as they are the only areas cooler than 70 degrees. However they cannot be there, as some research has shown fish really cannot survive in water with a dissolved oxygen of less than 3 mg/l. So now will the fish be suspended at around the 12 to 15 foot margin over deeper water, or will they be relating to the bottom at around the 12-15 foot depth marks? Also there aren't any weed edges to fish (a single dose of weed poison took care of all of them, and decaying weeds do wonders for your water quality).

[Grant Pearson]

any ideas on baits/lures to try on/right after opener? I'm thinking about slipping a bobber over a sucker or slowly twitching a jerk-bait bait right after opener. Last year, my largest esox came on a jerk-bait bait right after opener.

[Steve Foss]

VT, I'm assuming you are still talking about targeting the biggest pike in that lake. Has this lake produced any pike from 10 lbs up?

If there are bigger pike in the lake, my guess would be there could be fish both suspended at those temps/oxy levels and oriented to bottom structure at the same depths.

Small, shallow lakes like that generally don't have much of a suspended forage base, so if it was me I'd target the bottom structure by trolling cranks on days the pike are active (with a few passes at the same depth but over deeper water adjacent to those structures) and by jigging or slow rolling spinnerbaits when they don't seem active.

[Nick Kuhn]

Used to be pike caught in the 20lb range every year, and in a survey years ago they had netted a 46" fish that tipped the scale at just over 30lbs during a spring survey. This past years survey didn't yield any fish over 36" but they were targeting walleye with the nets so who knows.

The deal with the lake is there used to be some nice weeds at the 14 foot depth that few knew about (as early electronics had a tough time detecting them) where you could find them. Those are gone since the poisoning of Canadian waterweed (which in turn crashed the pike population about 7 years ago).

Suspended fish is an interesting question. There are suspended crappies, and lots of them. You'd be hard pressed to find anywhere on the lake where crappies weren't in casting distance. Smaller perch seem to be found at about the 7 foot marks near the bottom, the larger and more rare perch seem to be out near the bottom at about 12 feet. The problem is there's food for pike everywhere, but the pike are not everywhere. They are also very well fed, which makes things tougher.

[TroutYammer]

I have never tried for big pike in the spring but hunt them every fall (late fall after deer hunting just before ice) in deep clear lakes. 1-Oz Jig with a six-inch sucker minnow jigged really, really slow in 20-35FOW. Once in a while I also get a nice big walleye as a bonus fish.

But as far as spring fishing for big notherns...I'm all ears guys.

[Steve Foss]

VT, with high numbers of crappies, which tend to suspend over deeper water in daytime in mid-summer, I'd bet the larger pike looking for the combo of cooler water with enough dissolved oxygen to survive will be right in there feeding on the suspended crappies.

Given the temp/oxy profile of the lake, you might actually have a pretty lively community of several fish species all suspending at roughly the same level.

I've done a ton of fishing on a 700 acre lake with deep structure, excellent dissolved oxygen and 50 FOW max depth that continues to put out pike of excellent size (someone pulls out a 20-plus every year), and I target pike with deep divers by trolling through schools of crappies suspended along deep breaklines in 15 to 20 FOW over 30-40 FOW.

And if the pike aren't willing (on the few days even speed trolling with tight S curves won't trigger them), a fella can always pull out the ultralight and small jigs and drift through the crappies for his supper.