Minger saves the day

Was out today with Paul chucking some big soft plastics about, we was hopeful of a good day when we saw the water was reasonably clear. It was an over night frost though and high pressure, despite most pikers praying for cold weather to come i still think they need a little bit of time to adjust to it and a sudden change could put them off straight away. Its a guessing game with pike at times and your constantly trying to work them out, sometimes you get it right and often your left with not knowing if your theories are correct or not.

It was certainly cold on the hands to start with and the wind was a bit sharp too, we soldiered on and Paul was having a stinker again missing a couple of fish. Eventually i found a fish though and it turned out to be a nice double in great shape, but hell what a gammy mouth it had! I think it was slightly pug too but don't know if that was due to what ever was going on in its mouth, it had a few growths and generally looked sore. A shame really as it was a nice looking pike but it was obviously still feeding, i think we sometimes think pike are allot more fragile than they really are. They have been around as long as dinosaurs so they can't be that fragile, often you will catch fish pretty beat up with injuries but there still feeding and thriving.

The day never really improved although i did miss a couple of further fish myself, it was a day off work though and catching a gammy pike was better than working.