The lateral line is also extremely well developed

The lateral line is also extremely well developed.Pike can pick up vibrations from tens of meters awayand home in to the source with great accuracy. The one sense which is often not appreciated in pikeis their acute sense of smell. All pike, butespecially those which grow large, feed to a largeextent on dead fish. If you think about it, why wasteenergy chasing lively fish if there is an alternatesource of high protein food available. For this reasonthe pike’s sense of smell is certainly the match forit’s other senses. I am almost paranoid about keeping my pike baitsfresh. As fish breaks down, the muscle begins to decay.Very quickly the tissue becomes soft and loses thefresh smell of live fish. Although you will catch theodd fish on these baits, I much prefer to use baitsthat are either freshly killed, or still frozen when Icast them out. Using such fresh bait is not always possible though.Imagine you are away for a few days on the bank andcannot catch fresh bait. Even with the best insulatedcool bags available, baits will only remain frozen fortwenty four hours or so, much less during the summermonths. During the odd longer session that I fish, I now makesure that I have a range of artificial flavours to addto the baits. Although all of these flavours areclaimed to increase the catching ability of plain fishbaits, I have rarely found this to be the case whenfished against really fresh baits. Where they do comeinto their own is when the baits have lost thisfreshness. A good dousing with flavour can mask theodour of the bait for an hour or more, plenty of timefor a pike to pick it up. Flavours for pike fishing fall into one of twocategories in my mind. Firstly, there are the oilbased flavours which are ready diluted. These can beinjected under the skin, baits can be bathed in themand the mouth and body cavity can be filled. It is notpossible to overdose with these flavours and the mosteffective way of using them is to really cover thebait. The second type of flavour are the more highlyconcentrated varieties sold mainly for carp fishing.These must either be used in only small doses ordiluted before use. I tend to add around one mls ofconcentrated flavour to 200 mls of winterised fishoil to give the correct concentration. Just about anyof the huge range of concentrated flavours can be usedfor pike fishing, but some stand our above others.Strawberry is one flavour which, when combined withmackeral, seems to give a real edge. Blue cheese isanother flavour which combines well with fish baits.If you don’t want to use these two, have a look at thecatalogues of the bait companies and see whichflavours they recommend for use with fishmeal baits. Ican’t guarantee that flavouring your baits willinstantly make you more successful, but over thecourse of a year it may just bring you an extra fish

or two.