Pike my friend, when you fly in and can't find a walleye to eat for supper the first night it's pike in the pan. 20" works nicely when your hungry.

Pike up to 30" are great eating, especially the tail section. I have 50-60 pounds of pike filets in my freezer. Winter pike are best; I don't eat summer pike as they don't taste at all sweet. I grew up eating Michigan largemouth and liked them also. Nice tender flaky white meat when sauteed in butter. Bigger ones aren't as good as those the size that Brian has caught. Spring pike fishing through the ice can be pretty good up here. The big spawners like this 42 incher aren't especially good eating and go back down the hole.

Some of the best fish I've had are pickled pike cubes. The pickling solution dissolves the bones entirely and they are great hors duvres with your favorite beer, ale, or gin & tonic.

That's a beast Richard. What bait?





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My neighbor makes excellent pickled pike with fish from this same lake. We fish together there in April. We use frozen herring from Sportsmans Warehouse for bait. I drill two 10" holes, one with a tipup and on the other I use a vintage Garcia Ambassador 5000 casting reel on a stout little ice fishing rod, which works v well for these big pike. Quite sporty actually when they make a long powerful run and the drag is singing away - definitely a Hemingway moment. On a good day I land on the lake and am firing up an hour later to head home with my limit of 5 fish, filleted and skinned and in ziplocs in a cooler. The ravens love the scraps. On one particularly good day last spring I had a fish flopping in the snow, one on the skinning board and one running off with my bait all at once. That was a short day on the ice. No need for two holes on a day like that. On a bad day I can sit there freezing in the wind for 8 hrs and not catch anything, which only happens if it's late and the spawning is over. Sometimes we have a real fishing party with 3-4 planes on this lake.