Underwater fishing :: Pike
A pike is the most popular fish in Russia. There are so many fables, tales and tall stories of it! Even a person who spent all life in a desert can say of it: ‘It is a pike.’ Such is the spotty-stripy predator’s popularity.
The pike can be met in any water reservoir, even in the mountain rivers and brackish water of the coastal lakes of a sea. It lives in all sheets of water. However the pike has some favorite places. First of all, these are deep floods, overgrown with high underwater growth, or river bends, where the stream stops. Secondly, for example, it is a flat bottom of a channel with a stream and with a thick carpet of leaves of a yellow spatterdock. The pikes stay in the middle of calm water in the high grass and in the stream under the grass cover. If the pondweed bushes grow in the stream, then the covered with a fluttered grass pikes hide behind it above a naked sand bottom. In such place everyone who is moving up the stream will frighten off this fish. That is why it is better to hunt for it moving down the stream. Often the pike becomes a victim of a hunter, who dived under the nearest bush to look for a chub or a cat-fish. The pike stays there between the underwater branches near the water surface and a hunter shoots in its belly from the bottom. The pike position depends on the food in its stomach: after a successful hunt it lays on the bottom of a river.
Years ago, when there was a lot of fish, it was available to find out more of pike behavior. For example, we noticed constant neighborhood of a flock of ides and one or two pikes. In the stomachs of the predators of eight pounds where found half percost ides of two pounds. Seems like even full ‘herds’ don’t leave ‘their’ flock and swim after it. When they are hungry again there is no need to look for food – here it is, one may say, ‘always on the table’. Here is one more interesting notice. It is known that land and underwater predators often have their own well determined, fixed and guarded places of inhabitancy and hunting. This is only one explanation of big pikes behavior, when they sudden appear from the grass and slowly move straight to a hunter. If the hunter will freeze, then the territory defender will come because of a shot. This is only one situation when a moving pike can be shot. In all another cases hunters have to shoot at a standing pike. It darts off so fast, that it is not always clear, which way it disappeared: a flap, a cloud of haze and swinging grass stalks. It often happened that a hunter pulled the trigger while a pike wasn’t moving at all, an arrow flew just in the goal, but went into a naked floor, because the pike had disappeared already.
The pike on an arrow is the most desperate fighter for its freedom. It often comes off if it is shot in the side of a belly. Sometimes internals droop from the pike’s torn belly, but it runs away anyway. It is impossible to swim after it and it is sad, because the fish is killed for nothing. A wound in a belly cavity is fatal for all the fishes, but usually they can live with a torn back or a tail. Once I caught a big ide, which had a hole of two centimeters in its back. It was covered with new skin and even with rare scales of irregular shape. It not uncommon to see fishes with a torn and valgus lip, cut off fins and halved tails. Usually it is a ‘memory’ of meeting with the pikes and pikeperches.
They say that a fish should be taken under gills. Yes, it really can be taken so but not only a pike. The gills covers will close at once and your fingers will be caught between the gills, which are totally in sharp bone stamens inside, very similar to the pike teeth. It is more suitable to take it from above in the eye-sockets, putting a thumb and a forefinger in them. In this process it is better to cuddle a very big fish with another hand to limit its movement. This method is based on my own experience I had when a pike weighing twelve pounds bent abruptly and almost wrenched my fingers, with which I squeezed its eye-sockets strongly.
There is also a special method to hang a pike on a stringer: to pierce through both jaws with the stringer needle top-down or inversely. If a hunter didn’t so the predator’s big mouth will open under water pressure. In this case hundreds of the sharpest turned-inside teeth will hitch up all can be reached. And mostly they reach grass, diving suit hanging on your side or freely dropped left hand. To thread a stringer under jaws of a big pike doesn’t mean to close its toothy mouth, especially if it is not squeezed between another fishes on the stringer. In this case to protect yourself thread the stringer under the jaws twice. Now they are locked.
The last advice. At home when you are washing fish blenna off a rope under water stream move your fingers very careful because the pike teeth could stay there.