Grand Rapids has world-class smallmouth fishing inside the city limits and better water an hour in any direction, and the same runs hold pike. Our guest in this episode guides both, and the conversation ended up being less about Michigan than about a set of decisions that apply anywhere warmwater predators share a river: whether to run wire, where those fish actually sit, and why your streamer isn't moving the way you think it is.
The wire leader question, settled
Every warmwater angler has had this argument with themselves. You want a twenty-inch smallmouth, you don't want to get bitten off, and you've heard wire kills the bite. Our guest's answer is the most practical framing I've heard: if you're throwing a streamer in pike water, you are going to catch one of two things — a pike, or that big smallmouth. Both outcomes are fine. Only one of them ends with your fly on the bottom of the river.
So his rule is seasonal and water-clarity based, not dogmatic:
- Spring, dirty or muddy water: wire, almost every time. Roughly 12 inches of 20-pound knottable wire. He hasn't found the smallmouth bite gets turned off by it in fast, off-color spring water — they simply aren't inspecting the leader.
- Low, clear summer water: no wire. But he also isn't typically throwing into that kind of water expecting a pike, so the tradeoff rarely comes up.
For the connection, he uses a short two- or three-turn clinch from leader to wire. His own assessment of it is honest: wire knots always look ugly and knottable wire never seats beautifully. The real failure mode isn't the knot anyway — it's kinking. A hard pull on the running end will kink wire badly, so seat it gently and check the whole 12 inches after every fish. A kinked wire bite guard is a broken one waiting to happen.
Predators live in the slow water next to the fast water
The most common mistake he sees is anglers getting into good smallmouth and pike water and immediately throwing into the fastest current they can find. It looks fishy. It's usually empty.
Big predators want to sit in slow water adjacent to fast water — the seam, the eddy behind the boulder, the soft edge of a log jam — so the current delivers food without costing them anything to hold. Pike and smallmouth cohabitate more than people assume, and both are doing the same math.
Practically, that means reading a run backwards from how most of us do it. Find the fast water first, then fish the slow water touching it. Cast so the fly swims out of the fast seam and into the soft pocket, not across it. And get the fly low enough in the water column that when you do strip, it can swim around and through structure like a log jam rather than skating over the top of it.
Your strip moves less fly than you think
This is the detail I keep thinking about. When you strip, the fly moves further than the line does — or it feels like it should. What actually happens is the opposite: slack lives in your leader, so the first part of every strip goes into pulling that slack out. By the time the fly moves, half your strip is gone.
The fix is to manage slack before you start stripping, not during. Land the cast, let the line come tight to the fly, then begin. Two clean strips on a tight line will move a fly more convincingly than six sloppy ones on a bowed leader — and more importantly, you'll feel the eat, which on a slack leader you often won't.
The same principle explains why euro-style tightline nymphing translates so well to small and medium streamers: you're keeping contact, so the fly reports back to you.
Spring pike are on the feed bag
Pike spawn early, and the window right around that is when they are most aggressively eating. If you're going to fish one stretch of pike water all year, fish it in the spring — and that's precisely the muddy, high-water period where the wire leader decision above becomes easy.
Gear
What would help you most here isn't something we sell: a spool of 20-pound knottable wire and a sink tip or two so you can get a streamer down into the slow pockets. Your local fly shop will have both, and they'll know which sink rate matches your home water better than any online chart will.
On our end, the Tips and Tricks for Fly Fishing eBook is genuinely useful here — leader construction and knot mechanics are the whole ballgame when you're splicing wire into a system. And if you're launching before sunrise to beat the boat traffic, the FFIP Angler's Coffee Mug has ridden along on more of those mornings than I can count.
