The Little Things That Make Big Pike Bite

This article appeared in the May 2025 issue of In-Fisherman.

When Leonardo da Vinci was polishing up his pike presentations, he said, “Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.”

Okay, so the Renaissance man wasn’t really honing his pike fishing skills when he muttered that magisterial observation. But it’s still true.

As avid pike anglers know, there are few presentations—jerkbaits, swimbaits, glidebaits, spoons, and deadbaits—that we don’t already know about. We can say the same thing, too, about the best locations to fish for pike over the course of the season. So what sets apart the anglers who consistently haul the biggest brutes from tough-to-catch-pike waters, from the local Joes who rely on wishing, hoping, and dreaming to score similar rewards? In a word, it’s details.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Early in the season, for example, when pike are up shallow, near the same weedy, reedy, stick-laden areas where they recently spawned—current is an added bonus—waiting to dine on the hordes of white suckers, shiners, yellow perch, and other prey items coming in to lay their eggs, the faster and more horizontal you can retrieve your lure, the fewer and smaller the pike you generally catch.

Big fish are concentrated in shallow, ever-warming, isolated cover-filled water now, where food items are arriving daily in ever more plentiful numbers. So why rush and waste energy chasing?

For this reason, I lean heavily in the spring on dive-and-rise lures like a carefully weighted Bobby Bait or Rapala Super Shad Rap. You can cast these lures for distance and retrieve them erratically in short bursts of speed, yet stop and let them float up, when you park them beside any cover object, where a pike might be lurking in ambush.

I also fish a couple of killer pike lakes where the water has risen over the years—due to dam and road construction—and flooded sections of previously wooded lowlands. In other parts of the continent, these flowages and reservoirs are common, and it’s difficult to precisely pick apart every submerged tree trunk or stump. But hang the same quick-strike-rigged deadbait that you suspended beneath a tip up at last ice under a large slip float in the spring and watch what happens.

But again, presentation details abound.

I typically only fish deadbaits this way when there is a stout-enough breeze blowing to make the sucker or herring rise and fall, like a natural Bobby Bait. You can still catch pike when the weather is calm by twitching the bobber with your rod and reel, but most days deadbaits are deadbeats without sufficient wind to induce the much-needed and enticing up-and-down, dive-and-rise motion.

One last deadbait detail: When the water depth is less than 12 feet—which it typically is in the spring—set your sucker or cisco to suspend in the middle of the water column. When it is deeper than 12 feet I like to hang it 3 feet off the bottom.

Chatter in the Shadows

Because I live and fish primarily on the Canadian Shield, many of the boreal pike lakes are characterized by brown-colored water. It’s the result of tannins leaching out of decomposing needles, leaves, and vegetation, much like tea leaves in a pot of hot water. And because many of the lakes have slow to almost non-existent flushing rates, the brown color doesn’t diminish; it can actually increase slowly over time, reducing light penetration and limiting weed growth.

It’s called brownification and a recent study by researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland has documented that with the exception of a few fish—members of the zander family like walleye, for example—most other species including pike are negatively affected by the decreased availability of food. And yet, these same tea-stained waters consistently produce some of our biggest fish. It’s likely the result of a domino of details coming into play.

With limited light penetration, what little weed growth there is in many of these brown-water lakes is shallow and isolated, making it much easier to pick apart, especially compared to a football field bed of grass. With vegetation often at a premium, pike are also forced to use shoreline cover like the sharp edge of a smooth bedrock point sloping off the end of an island, isolated boulders, and fallen trees and branches as ambush spots. And with their visual acuity reduced by the tannin-stained water, they incorporate their heightened lateral-line abilities into their hunting strategies.

You can capitalize on the reliance by always having at least one rod rigged with a large 1/2-ounce plus vibrating jig (Chatterbait-style bait) tipped with a 5-, 6-, even 7-inch-long, straight-tail, soft-plastic minnow. On brown-colored pike lakes it’s often my go-to presentation early in the season. Some days, I never put it down.

250 Million Years in Development

I’m also obsessed with keeping the boat up shallow on brown-water lakes so I can cast parallel to the shoreline. When you position yourself out deep and pitch in to shore like most anglers do, you waste 3/4 of your presentation and miss many key site-specific cover and attack locations. A medium-speed lift-pause-fall-slow-pumping retrieve is what you want to feel throughout the presentation, keeping your vibrating jig in constant contact with everything lying on the bottom. And strikes are typically surprisingly un-pike-like. Most of the time, you’ll think you’ve snagged a heavy stick or branch when you lift up your rod tip, only to feel the sudden surge of a powerful pike.

“The most fascinating thing about pike anatomy is their lateral line,” says good friend and In-Fisherman contributor Jeff Matity, when we interviewed him on our Doc Talks Fishing podcast. “Every event that a pike has with a struggling prey fish, it’s picking it up from yards away with its lateral line. Pike can feed well with their lateral line.”

When we suggest to Matity that he makes the fish’s sensory structure sound like Mother Nature’s perfect forward-facing sonar system, he chuckles and says, “Well, it has been 250 million years in development.”

Clear Away the Fog

Of course, there are just as many clear water lakes that harbor monster pike as there are tea-pot flowages, and it’s typically here that weed growth abounds. Ciscoes (aka herring and tullibees) also frequent many of these same uncloudy waters, especially if they stratify and offer cool temperatures in depths exceeding 40 feet deep in the summer. It’s an interesting relationship—pike, vegetation, and ciscoes—because at first glance they seemed opposed, even contradictory.

But as always, the devil is in the details.

According to Matity, a pound of cisco flesh translates into the same number of calories as a quarter-pounder with cheese. It’s why pike relish the soft-finned, high protein, buttery prey items so much. They can’t help but grow large and fast, once they’re big enough to fit the prey into their mouths. So we tend to find the biggest pike in lakes that host the densest populations of ciscoes and their closely related whitefish cousins.

And even though the silvery forage is rarely, if ever, found in or near the shallow weeds that pike inhabit, they can’t get them out of their minds. Even in the middle of summer, when a big pike is hidden in ambush along the edge of a cabbage bed, slither a long slender silver-and-gold Williams Whitefish spoon with a trailing white 5-inch grub through the stalks, letting it flutter down when it reaches the edge, and hold on. It’s how I’ve caught a disproportionate number of my biggest pike ever.

I should mention, too, that the very best cabbage beds are the ones growing in the deepest water, in the closest proximity to the main lake basin. So a giant pike can hide in the weeds, slide out, visit a deep rocky structure, forage for ciscoes, and return to its sanctuary with the fewest kicks of the tail.

Doubling Up On Kleptomaniac Pike

Knowing this addictive feeding behavior, the other deadly cisco-related pike presentation is one that we have highlighted many times in the past. Swimming heavy 1/2- to 1-ounce saltwater jigs tipped with 5-, 6-, and 7-inch paddletail swimbaits on main-lake structure—underwater points, humps, and rockpiles—that intersect or verge on the thermocline. You know how to do it, visualizing and keeping your lure swimming within a foot of the bottom, but what you may not yet have incorporated into the presentation is doubling up on kleptomaniacs.

I got onto this pike pattern, curiously enough, while fishing—especially in the fall—for smallmouths. Knowing how a struggling bass empties its stomach as other members of the pack pursue it, gobbling up whatever it spits out, we routinely throw a fast-sinking lure beside every nice bass (the trick rarely works with little smallmouths) that our partner is fighting. Intriguingly, the trailing smallmouth is almost always bigger. And more fascinating is how often the pursuing fish is a big pike.

It happened enough times while bass fishing that we started routinely dropping a second lure on almost every nice pike we hooked as well—especially medium-size pike—and the results were stunning. Just as it’s been with big lake trout. The pursuing pike are almost always the biggest prodigious predators.

“Kleptoparasitism isn’t unique to pike,” Matity explains. “It’s not unique to lakers and it’s not unique to smallies. It’s just something that bigger, more experienced fish do. They have no concept of that fish being on a hook and line. They simply have a concept of it struggling with something.

“I call 36- to 42-inch pike teenagers. But they’re the killers. They kill big suckers. They kill lake trout. They kill other baits. It’s well documented that they take on something a full one-third of their body size. If you’re a fish at that stage of your life, you better make sure that each one of those kills doesn’t cost you physically. A scale in the teeth, a spine in the eye, those types of things. The only pike we’ve seen that are kleptos are in the mid- to upper-40-inch range.

“Kleptoparasitism means that they steal food from a conspecific, from one of their own. And it’s these monster pike that slide in beside these big 20-pound pike that are killing big things and steal it. A 20-pounder is struggling with a 14- to 16-inch sucker and a still bigger pike feels it with its lateral line.

“They may even follow up to a half dozen pike that are killers. Just like those killers follow a loose school of suckers. Something good is going to happen and all I have to do is be there.”

Highfliers, Hustlers, and Bootstrappers

Ice fishing for lake trout has taught me a precious lesson about big pike behavior in the open-water season. For some reason that I don’t understand fully—likely connected to thermoregulation and pelagic prey—the fish we perceive as ambush predators often hunt high in the open-water column. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been ice fishing for lake trout and watched a huge fish suddenly appear just under the ice, slide across the top of the sonar screen, streak down and devour our lure near the bottom. It has to be a big trout you tell yourself, and yet, it is a giant pike. Never, ever, ever a small snooben.

“Pike and lake trout rule the roost in ways we don’t even understand,” Matity says. “They’re opportunistic and when they’re within 100 yards of their favorite food—a school of ciscos, yellow perch, or shiners—they take advantage of it. So if a small pike—or your bait—runs through their three-dimensional field of vision, a snap of the tail and that thing’s done. Whether they’re hunting or resting.”

Especially in the fall, and particularly adjacent to shallow main-lake rocky points, shoals, and reefs, where you suspect, or know from past experience that lake trout and whitefish spawn, ciscos hang high up in the water column, rush down to the bottom, grab a mouthful of eggs, and scoot back up to the surface, harassing the spawning fish incessantly. They do the same thing in mid-winter when burbot are laying their eggs, but that is a story for another day.

My favorite presentation is pitching a 7- to 11-inch WaterWolf Shadzilla or Toddy Tickle Warhammer swimbait. I let it fall straight to the bottom on slack line after the cast, then I point my rod at the lure and quickly reel five or six times, while I elevate the rod tip. Then, when it is pointing straight up, I drop it quickly so the lure plummets headfirst, straight back down to the bottom.

The near vertical fall is critical to the presentation as I am doing everything I can to avoid having the lure swing in a pendulum fashion back toward me. I’ll even hit the freespool button to aid in its decent. Then, when the lure hits the bottom again and my line goes limp, I repeat the maneuver until it’s eventually back to the boat. It’s a unique up-and-down presentation, imitating the dive-bombing, egg-stealing ciscos on these special high percentage lake trout and whitefish spawning grounds, but do it right and you’ll feel like a Renaissance man.  

Over to you, Leonardo.

Gord Pyzer, of Kenora, Ontario, has been an In-Fisherman Field Editor and TV host for more than 30 years. He’s a former Ontario resource manager, and has been inducted into both the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in the U.S. and the Canadian Angler Hall of Fame in Canada, the only angler and writer to be so honored in both countries.

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