predatory fish. The normal rule

Unless you are on some of the huge waters in the north of England, or some of the reservoirs, then the successful pike anglers know that they must keep moving to achieve consistent sport. It is a fact of life that pike fishing on most lakes has far more troughs than peaks. Most waters contain only relatively small fish, and even when a big fish does turn up it is likely to be on its own. Put one big fish in a water and the chances are it will only be caught for a few years before disappearing. No, unlike cyprinid fish, which can go on for decades, pike fishing is a much more transient sport. I believe that there is not a lot we can do about this. I think that pike populations differ from other coarse species in several fundamental ways which work against consistent sport. Pike are predators and are much more reliant upon the availability of prey to grow large. Pike will manage to subsist in a water when there appears to be nothing but pike in there, but to get large they do require an ample supply of fodder fish. Now, it is a widespread misconception that pike ravage stocks of smaller fish. Truth is, they simply do not eat enough small fish to make much of a difference. Unfortunately though, the pike are much more reliant upon the small fish and numbers must be almost abnormally high for big fish to be produced. The weight of pike a water can support is also much less than non-predatory fish. The normal rule-of-thumb is that there will only be one tenth of the weight of pike in a water to their prey. Now most mature waters have a prey fish stock of around 300lb per acre, so each acre can support 30lb of pike. Now that could be one thirty pounder, but much more likely it will be a double, half a dozen jacks and a few immature fish. Couple this with the fact that less than half of the pike in a natural population have the ability to make weights of more than ten pounds anyway. Male pike very rarely grow bigger than seven or eight pounds yet tend to make up a little over fifty percent of the population. Male pike probably have a higher metabolic rate than a female, so they will need to eat more, so their affect upon the environment is as great as a much bigger female. Even in a much bigger body of water, the chances of a female finding enough food to grow to a large size are relatively remote and most fish will stay small. Small waters appear to need almost freakish conditions then to produce just one or two big pike. As the water gets larger there is more chance of big pike coming through, but I feel that it is only on waters of fifty acres plus where you can expect larger pike (upper doubles and twenties) to be present all the time. Although pike may live for longer than we have previously estimated from scale readings. I think it is unlikely that they live to any great age. I personally think that twenty years is a very good age for a pike. Big pike may actually live for a shorter time than smaller ones. This is quite a common phenomenon, where the extra energy used in growing fast seems to take a toll on the big fish.

Although it is a different scenario, look at Redmire. All the remaining original carp are relatively small compared to the maximum size produced in the water. So once a pike becomes large enough to be of interest to specialist anglers, perhaps it’s days are numbered? Perhaps even without being caught it has only a few months or years to live before dying. Couple this short period when it is of a large size, and the small number of big fish in most waters and you can see why waters come and go so quickly. Although it might be possible to manage fisheries in a way which maximises the production of big pike, I think for most of us, fishing less intensively managed fisheries, we will just have to get used to the constant hunt for new waters.