06-07-27

Thursday

Another nice summer fishing day

Seems like here we go again with another tedious diary. I know I promised that you could hope for a long break now that my summer vacation finally was over but I felt that after today's fishing I just had to write a few lines about it. And show (off) a few nice photos from the day.

Let's start with this picture showing the fog. It's from the boat landing in Långö in the town of Karlskrona. You may recognize the bridge from the summer summary, where to the far left, I had that confrontation with the angry swans. But today they were gone and no one was trying to stop me getting to my boat. But the fog was even a bigger nuisance than the swans.  I just hate fog! The distance to the tall buildings the other side of the narrow strait, isn't more than about 50 meters and that would be the limit for the eye-sight.

The older you are, the more afraid and anxious you get, at least in my case. More often than not I usually turn around and go back home when I find out that the fog lies heavily upon the water. But I knew that the weather would be fine as soon as the fog lifted so I went out anyway. I have no fancy GPS or DECCA Navigator or anything like it but an ordinary compass that these running-around-in-the-wood, these orienteerers use. But none the less it can be tricky, slalom your way out from the nearest islands and islets to get out to my fishing locations. And just like in some silly TV-show I got lost. 
I couldn't figure out where I was. But luckily enough the fog lifted its damp hand at least a little and more and more I got back my foothold of reality. At last it dawned upon me that, aha, am I here? OK, then that is the right direction!
But it took me an extra hour to get where I wanted.
And when at last I started to fish (or cast anyway), the weather was all wrong. Dead calm and a blazing, hot sun. And not only that, the same almost tropical summer weather had been going on for well over a month by now. 
Oh, I was very much aware of it and in fact, that was the main reason I went out in the first place, to enjoy the warmth and sun and have a nice day out on the sea. I started out with a large sized white pike sara but soon found out that it was ridiculously out of place today. First thing it was way too heavy in the calm. It was too hard to cast, I thought and wouldn't fool any pike today anyway so I changed to a little One Size. Perch, I thought. Why not try for perch? Or maybe a one kilo little pike?
I hadn't much more hope than that but like I said, I didn't mind either. I knew the conditions for today's fishing trip, all right.

I've been a keen fisherman for pike for 50 years and more often than not I find out that I know very little of the greenish, yellow spotted, sharp teethed, longish predator fish.   So I can't really explain why this big eight kilos pike struck.  But it certainly turned out to be a glad surprise when I finally could lift it in the boat after a long fight. I hadn't realized until that moment how big it really was.  We all have our personal standards how big a pike really is and in my book, this is a big pike. In fact, after a quick glance in my statistic table over this year's catches, the biggest so far. After I had let it go back to the water, I got this happy feeling that no matter how the rest of the day's fishing went, the day was saved.  I was thinking in the direction that freak accidents might happen and no rule without exceptions, right? And the expertise rule is of course that it is almost impossible to have good fishing during the very weather conditions you clearly also can see on the picture here to the right. That rule usually is a very sound one and I preach it now and then here in my diary pages. But one fact fell into place and that was that the location was what I call a big pike place. My definition is that you might see a really big pike hereabout once every two years and catch one every third year.

They don't actually go in large schools, these big pikes even here, you know. Then we have the interesting question if the pike struck despite, or due to the size of the fly? You remember the One Size? It's fly designed to catch both sea trout and pike; a compromise between little and big. All compromises are bad of course, but better yet than nothing.
There is this debate going on whether you should use big lures or flies for big pikes and I mean really big in both cases. I have heard that...
Oh, sorry, back the tape! I was completely wrong here, I suddenly remember. No debate. How can it be a debate when all are unanimous about it?  How silly of me!
But strangely enough, just now, when I checked in my statistics table, I saw that the second biggest pike this year, 7,5 kilo, also got caught on a One Size. But of course that isn't really a big pike. Surly and of course, it was just another freak accident.
I'm well aware that in the real statistics, not my own puny little table, that the big lures and enormous baits win it all. It looks the same year after year here in Sweden. And here we can talk big pikes for sure! 15-20 kilos. Maybe even bigger, I don't read the magazines nowadays. And because statistics never lie it must be so.
Never for a minute I would suspect that because everybody knows for a fact that in order to catch a really big pike, you must have a big lure and I would be stupid to try anything else, therefore all them expertise big pike fishermen always make their spectacular catches using big baits, lures and flies. 
And that stands to reason that a big fish or big animal never would bother with less than the biggest prey. Like a wolf never would catch a mouse or a whale never would catch anything smaller than a... a... Oh sorry, that was a bad example... 
But enough of this debate. 

I stay content catching these four kilo pikes. Like this on the photo to the left.  The most important reason for me not have caught a real giant of a pike during all these years is, I think, that there are not that many pikes over 15 kilo around. I've seen them a couple of times to be sure so I know they exist but I'm not desperately trying to go for them either.  If I get lucky one day, fine. But my life surly isn't ruined if I don't succeed either.  Like today it was a pleasure just to be out on the calm sea having a good time in the sunshine. For the first time in many years the weather permitted me to do so many times this summer as well.  Now let's return to the fishing. I kept the One Size or to be precise, changed to another. The first one got a little too chewed up. Or the wire leader was. The calm weather continued and for some reason the pikes also continued to bite. Mostly ordinary sized two kilos pikes at first. Then something remarkably happened. I got a pike weighing four kilo. No, that wasn't remarkable at all today. And it isn't that pike on the picture either.   When a pike bites, I usually anchor up. Then I won't drift away from the good area or be cast ashore on a mystical tropical island with only one palm tree on.

But when I had let the first pike go back to the water, the second pike struck. On the first cast. A bigger pike. Two kilos bigger to be exact. A six kilos pike takes some minutes to deal with. But when that business was all over I got prepared to do another cast. Ripped out some eight or ten meters of fly line and made a half hearted cast. Took in the fly as usual and saw a glimpse of the third pike. A big glimpse it was too! Yes, the third pike on the third cast was just as big as the last one. But it only followed after. Had I just made a usual cast with the full line length the chances would be great to get three big (well almost) pikes in a row in three casts after one another. A new world record even maybe!
But I didn't hung my head and cried like Tom Dooley did, of course. I was happy anyway with the overall situation. 
Maybe you think I contradicted myself saying that big pikes don't swim around in schools? But they don't. Instead they draw near from unknown distances to see what's going on when the first pike makes up so much noise and vibrations trying to get away from both the boat and the fly. Other pikes can feel that and think that there's a hunt going on. Envious and anxious not to miss a free lunch, they hurry to the place of commotion with their appetite and readiness to strike rising.

This is a phenomenon that I've seen happen too many times to think it's a coincidence that several pikes gather round in one small place in this  manner. Of course it doesn't work every time you get a pike.  There's got to be pikes around in the vicinity which isn't always the case. A friendly warning to you all, foreign readers out there when you take a look at this picture, that beware of all those photo phony phakers out here on the Internet. Specially in my line of business as a fishermen there's this little trick of holding up the fish as close to the camera as possible. So close that the camera lens gets all soaking wet of slime from the fish even! Just to cheat and say the fish was twice as big as it really was. Need I say that the above was not my reason for doing so? Of course not. No, my meaning was to show you how small the fly really was.  "Hey you dumb ass! Throw away the beer can and get started with that camera!" I shouted to my photographer. "Take a close up on the fly!" And for once he succeeded pretty well. But I could've got away with it calling this a 6 or 7 kilos pike, right? But it's just one of the four 4 kilos pikes I got today. What I wanted to tell you with this revealing truth how other fishermen would do, is that me you can trust. Honest as the day is long, that's me!

Today I also was lucky in matching a day with little or no wind with a day off at work. Right now they are very scarce, I can tell you, days off work, I mean. 
In many ways this day turned out to be the best day so far both this summer and this year. 
Now as I write this several days after it happened, the fine summer weather seems to go towards its end. 
Phooey, it's so darned hard to write in English, that's why it takes so long!
But the combination with my working more than my share and a more rainy and windy period on the way, I won't have to do that for many days to come. Maybe even weeks!