Starting the Winter Pike Season

Arriving at a local lake just before light it was obvious we'd had a dry summer, at least two foot of water was missing. This made selecting a swim a problem, as the normally sunken branches were now out of the water and the areas around the tree roots had at most six inches of water.










I decided to start at the first swim and give each one an hour or so. I had sardine, lamprey, sprat, and roach with me. One rod to any feature and the other out to a dying weed bed or straight out to the middle. I was in the second swim when the sun made an appearance through the trees creating an orange blob right where my float was, near one of the few bank side features. As I squinted through the shades the float popped up about two foot nearer to me than it had been. I retrieved a slightly chews roach. This was the only action I saw for the next few hours as I moved from swim to swim. It wasn't until the last but one swim that I got another run, again dropped. Just before I was about to move to the last swim I latched into a nice jack of nearly 70cm. Which, in a tribute to the late John Wilson, shed the hook in the net.

It's going to take a while for the pit to get back to a better level, although this isn't the lowest I've seen it.