It’s become a trend of mine to watch a good fishing hole decline in productivity, only to later find it was due to a Pike moving in.  That was the case again last weekend during a trip to the Credit.

I got an early morning start and decided to take my time wading a long stretch of river that I hadn’t fished in quite some time. I started off hiking in to a hole that I knew held good fish, figuring early morning would be my best bet to land a decent fish. As I swung a streamer through the pool on my fourth or fifth cast, I felt an aggressive take followed by head shakes and some serious tugging.  I hadn’t caught a decent fish from this pool in a while and judging by the way the fish was fighting (which admittedly felt very similar to a Brown Trout at the time), I was sure I’d caught the largest trout of my life.

Fortunately, I was fishing with 2X tippet, but unfortunately, when I finally got the fish to the surface, I realized it was another Credit River Pike that would easily make short work of my mono leader. This pike was quite a bit larger than the previous one I’d caught last season and for obvious reasons, I wanted to land it so I could get it out of there. These pike are Island Lake escapees and when they’re this far down, they would have had to descend the Cataract Falls. I barely prevented it from escaping downstream and managed to land it with my tippet frayed and almost broken off.

This unexpected Pike put a serious bend in my four-weight.

Razor sharp teeth – efficient trout eating tools.

I bitch about the Atlantic Salmon stocking on the Credit all the time, including the proposed changes to protect the Atlantics and Brookies (mainly, removing the wild Browns)… and stuff like this just boggles my mind.  We have Pike devouring who knows how many Brookies and Atlantics, poachers regularly lifting trophy sized Brookies out of the river, water quality issues upstream… and yet our first steps are going to be get rid of the Brown Trout that have been wild in this river for decades and co-existing happily with Brook Trout (no only in this river, but countless others)?  OK, I’m sounding like a broken record again  – I’ll stop.

As for the rest of my day on the river, I caught about a dozen or so small fish, but nothing significant. When I say small, I mean sub 8″ and I can’t even count the number of misses I had. It definitely wasn’t an overly productive day, but good to be out nonetheless.

I also ran across a couple friendly anglers and thinking back to some comments one of them made, I believe he may follow this blog.  I mentioned catching the Pike to him, so if that person happens to be you, please leave a comment and say hi.

Anyway, there’s one less Pike terrorizing the upper Credit and hopefully some nice trout will be moving back into that hole again.