Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Post-spawn pike move into shallow sandy or muddy bays where the bottom holds heat and helps them digest. Look for cabbage weed growing thin, roughly one plant every eight to ten feet, over silt or sand, and in the first weeks after ice-out find the warmest water in the lake and fish it.
Matt Marin is an independent fly fishing guide working out of Ontario on Georgian Bay, running roughly 230 days a year for pike, musky, smallmouth bass, carp and lake-run rainbows.
Also on Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Where do pike sit after the spawn?
Post-spawn pike push into shallow bays with sandy or muddy bottoms, because that sediment absorbs heat and the fish are effectively sunbathing to metabolize food they have already eaten out off the drop-offs. That means they are not actively hunting, but a fly placed well still gets eaten. In the first weeks of the season the productive move is to hunt water temperature rather than structure: if the main lake is in the low to mid 40s and back bays reach the mid 50s or 60s, find the warmest bay available. The pattern reveals itself abruptly, with several bays in the 50s producing a few bites and one at 58 degrees holding active fish.
What weed and bottom type holds pike?
The specific weed to look for is cabbage, called tobacco cabbage locally because the broad brown leaf resembles a tobacco plant. Density matters more than presence. Very thick growth means constantly picking weeds off the fly and leaves no room for the fish; the ideal is sparse, roughly one plant every eight to ten feet, so pike can get down into it and still use their short burst of speed to run down bait. Bottoms are silt, sand or muck, which warm first in spring. Spring forage on that water is white sucker and invasive smelt, which run about six inches and silver, and pike key on them heavily.
What leader does pike fly fishing require?
A pike leader should be short and stout rather than tapered and long, and this one is four feet total: two feet of 40 pound nylon, one foot of 25 pound nylon, and one foot of bite wire. Four feet turns a heavy fly over easily, and just as importantly it keeps the fly at the same depth as a sinking line instead of letting the fly ride above it. That produces direct contact, so there is no slack in the system and the fly does exactly what it is supposed to do on every strip. Commercial pike leaders get skipped in favor of tying this formula.
What lines should be rigged for a day of pike fishing?
Rigging several rods before launching removes the guesswork. A working setup is five rods carrying a couple of floating lines, an intermediate, and triple-density lines down to sink three and sink five, so a prospecting rod is always ready. The principle behind the sink five is not depth for its own sake, it is that the line gets the fly down rather than the fly getting itself down, which frees the angler to throw a big, air-resistant, lightly weighted pattern. With two anglers in the boat, put one on a small fly with dumbbell eyes on a floating line and the other on a six to eight inch streamer on a sinking line, then track who is drawing strikes and where in the retrieve those strikes come.
How should you retrieve a fly for pike?
Pike want the fly moving. Small pauses within the strip are useful, but a deliberate three or four second dead stop is not, because the goal is not to make the fly appear dead or change levels. The working strip is hand to hip, about a foot and a half to two feet, with the casting arm extended forward eight to ten inches further than feels natural so there is room to strip past the hip and room left for a hook set. Flies are chosen for built-in action, so that when the strip stops the pattern rotates and flashes. Counterintuitively, when a pike follows the fly the answer is to accelerate into a fast stutter strip rather than slowing down to feed it, because bait does not stop and wait for a predator.
How do you sight fish laid-up pike?
On clear lakes with low fish density, covering water is the wrong approach and a full day may involve only around 100 casts. The search is visual: laid-up pike sit in two feet of water or less and look like logs, so the tell is sediment. A log carries sediment on it, a fish does not, so a clean-looking shape is usually a pike. Flies are moderate, around four or five inches, with bead chain eyes and often black, since a large fly startles a laid-up fish. The cast lands 10 to 15 feet beyond the fish at about a 45 degree angle so the fly quarters across the snout rather than crossing the tail, then it sinks, gets stripped in to about three feet away, and hops on the bottom in short taps. Watch the dorsal fin, which sits far back on a pike: when it rotates, the fish is generating direction and is about to move.
How do you land a pike without losing it at the boat?
Most pike eats happen close, so the set changes. Once the leader and fly are at the rod tip, a strip set has nowhere to go and the better move is a hard lift straight up, moving the fish's head and keeping constant pressure on after. Do not try to wind line onto the reel; let the fish put you on the reel instead, because reeling manually while a fish moves toward the boat drops fish. Keep the rod low or tipped into the water so the head stays down, since a pike shaking its head above the surface is the most common way to lose one. Net the fish head first, in a genuinely big net, around 36 inches wide with a deep basket, so it can stay in the water in the net while the hook comes out. Barbless hooks are worth using because pike inhale a fly with a vacuum and it often ends up deep, and both ends of the boat should carry long-nose pliers, bolt cutters and jaw spreaders.
Key takeaways
- Tie a four-foot pike leader: two feet of 40 pound, one foot of 25 pound, one foot of bite wire.
- In early season, search by water temperature and fish the warmest bay you can find rather than the best-looking structure.
- Look for cabbage weed growing thin, about one plant every eight to ten feet, over silt or sand bottoms.
- When a pike follows, speed the retrieve into a stutter strip instead of slowing down to feed it.
- Fish laid-up pike by looking for clean, sediment-free shapes and casting 10 to 15 feet past them at a 45 degree angle.
- Fish in stocking feet or use a stripping mat; standing on the line is the single most common reason a new boat angler cannot reach 50 feet.
