Forum | Northern Pike

Well, hunting can be done but it's much more difficult & expensive to get licences for shotguns and rifles than I imagine it is where you are. apart from vermin control, it's mostly pheasant shooting with 12 bores if you can afford it, otherwise you are talking rabbiting with ferrets or air rifles and woodpigeon etc, provided you have a landowners permission, which sometimes is not easy to obtain if you don't know the right people as I discovered many years ago.

Just had a drive past my two local lakes today, one is still 100% frozen over , the other is about 90% ice around 4 inches thick, trouble is the 10% of clear water is about two miles from the boat launch ramp, and the low temperatures are forecast to continue for a while. I may have to get my cod fishing gear set up and go back to sea fishing to wet a line if this continues.

I live right on the coast but have done little sea angling over the last 20 years due to the decimation of fish stocks by commercial vessels.Used to get some good catches of cod and whiting from the shore 15 minutes walk from home during Winter in the 70s & early 80s, but it's a struggle now.

Yeah ice sucks,but for a different reason thick ice sucks even more one of the reasons I moved here.But while my pond froze main lake was open harbors however did freeze but at paris landing,the commercial fishermen broke the ice and kept a path open to the ramp most of the bad freeze.

Also the cg tugs are based here they will open it up if it gets solid,but only here,commercial tugs tend to keep the main open but at the same time their is a cg ice breaker ship,that will come in if necessary.

Places that do not normally see much snow generally arnt prepared for it,nor have decent plans if it does hit the fan.

The only real noticable difference i see is the way they apply salt here by mixing it with water and spraying with a nozzle as they drive down the road,definately goes farther and bettter application area wise as well.Like many areas once one leaves the well traveled your on your own.

Most of the wet cold systems get to pafucah and turn left towards ind and ohio as come from the nw.Very much like the summer rains missing us most of it does as well,but every now and then will dip down the other 45 miles or so just to remind us.

Looks like we are in for another proper Winter again Lilmule, at least for a while.The temperature has not risen above -1C  or zero for the last few days here in NW England with plenty snow on the ground. the main problem here is for many years the Winters have been very mild and the authorities only tend to treat the major roads due to stocks of road grit based on this fact, which means getting to some fishing places can be difficult without a 4×4 vehicle. Also if the lakes freeze as they did at the start of this year, you can't fish because the ice is never thick enough to risk ice fishing.

Those preconseptions about the rain aren't too far from the truth Lilmule. Our prevailing weather systems come from the South west which often means wet and windy in Winter,& the Gulf stream means the temperatures are much milder than we deserve for our latitude. We are quite a bit farther North than The state of Wisconsin or Minesota for example, and scenes like the one in the photo below are quite rare. The last couple of years though, we have been getting a lot of weather in from the North & east and the statisticians tell us that this was the coldest UK Winter since the early 1960s or something. We tend to have cold snaps which last a week or so and they are not usualy long enough to freeze the big lakes over, certainly not flowing water, even in the picture below, that ice was not thick enough to risk fishing through.

Steve.

Like you say pike feed during the Winter. They are, like many predators opportunists which will pick up dead prey should they find it, but mostly it will be live fish they catch (as I'd hope they outnumber the dead ones!). I must admit it is often very pleasant to relax in the boat on a nice Winters day, drinking tea & hot soup and watching a float slide away as a fish picks up the bait. Even then I tend to move location quite often and twitch the baits toward the boat every 10 minutes or so to cover the area. It's surprising how many times a pick up occurs within a few minutes of twitching the bait I am usually more confident though when covering water with a mobile bait or lure.