Alaska Fish & Game: How to Fish for Northern Pike

And there's a fish! Oh, it's a good one too.

So we'll lift her up, I'm going to gently cradle her here and send her on her way now.

Hi, my name is Matt Albert. I'm a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and today we're going to talk about fishing for northern pike. Northern pike are a great sport fish because of their aggressive strikes and the V-wakes that they make as they're following lures in.

You can find them pretty much anywhere between rivers, lakes, sloughs, wetland complexes, swamps. In Alaska, northern pike are native to areas north of the Alaska Range, including the interior, western and southwestern Alaska, and the North Slope. South of the Alaska Range, through illegal introductions, pike have become established as an invasive species. However, wherever you find pike in Alaska, they're a phenomenal sport fish species and well worth your time to fish for.

Woo! Nice! In interior Alaska, there's reasonable opportunity in some fisheries to catch fish that are over 40 inches long and weigh over 20 pounds. That could be over 20 years old.

Pike make fantastic table fare. They have white flaky flesh. They're exceptional deep-fried or in beer batter. They make great fish tacos. Anything you'd cook with white flesh fish, pike will work great.

They require a little bit more effort to properly fillet them, to remove all the extra bones, but it's easy to learn and it's well worth the extra effort. For anglers looking to improve their chances at catching large pike. Getting away from the road system into more remote areas is going to increase your chances to find large fish. Minto Flats is a great pike fishery. It has almost unlimited opportunity.

It's a really large wetland complex, and you oftentimes see moose or all sorts of waterfowl and raptors and other birds, and get to see some landscapes that you don't normally see fishing in interior Alaska. It's only accessible via boat or airplane.

So let's get started. So we're going to talk about some of the gear and tackle that you'll be needing to use for fishing for northern pike. Most commonly, folks will be using a spinning rod and reel. Generally, rods that are 6 to 8.5 feet long work just fine. Personally, I prefer to use a baitcaster.

I find I get less line twist. And it's a little bit lighter. So both of these reels are loaded with 30-pound braided line. Monofilament line will work just fine as well. However, I prefer the braided line because it has less stretch and it's thinner diameter.

Fish on! This allows for a better hook set and lets you cast further. And you'll notice on both of these rods I'm using a steel leader. Pike have sharp teeth, they'll easily cut through either braided or monofilament line. They're real important for keeping your lures attached.

As you can see on this setup, I have a barrel swivel in between the fishing line and the leader. Many of the lures we're using spin, and without a barrel swivel, they'll twist your line up really quickly. To connect to the lure, I have a snap. There's multiple different styles of snaps, they all work just fine. Now that we've covered the rods, reels, and line and leaders, you'll need Let's talk about the tackle.

Broadly, you can define the lures as either a surface lure or subsurface. We're going to talk about the subsurface lures first. Most people think of using a red and white spoon, or a real common pike fishing lure is a weedless spoon. Uh, most commonly you'll see them in silver or gold. One thing to keep in mind is this weed guard, which pushes the weeds away from the hook point.

You want to make sure that when you're fishing it, that it is bent out away from the hook point. Another common thing that you'll see in some spoons is rigging a plastic trailer onto the hook, add a different color or some extra action to the lure. You can use a spinner. Oftentimes they have a bucktail to give the lure a bigger profile.

Or when there's some weeds around, a spinnerbait, which rides like that with a hook point up with your line attaching here at the center of the wire V. They're not weedless, but they collect less weeds than a straight spinner will. Another real common subsurface lure for pike fishing are plugs. You have jointed plugs, or you can have just a straight-bodied plug. It's mainly matching the plug to the water that you're fishing. If you're fishing in shallow water, you're going to want to use a shallower fishing plug.

So in this tackle tray, we have some soft plastics, swimbaits, and surface lures, and they can range from a simple rubber worm and— or a stick bait, or we can have swimbaits. And the swimbaits can come with a hook in them from the manufacturer and oftentimes these will have a lead weight attached to it as well to help them sink. Or with other ones without a hook in them, you'll be attaching it to your own hook. Most of the time you use a longer shank hook. You can rig them multiple different ways.

Typically, if it's not too weedy, you can rig them like that, or you can twitch it and jerk it along, use some long pauses and let it slowly sink. Pike really like that slow sink with these softer lures. Or you can rig it with the hook point covered by the lure body, and this helps keep it more weedless. However, when you're fishing with these soft plastics, it's really important to get a good hook set on the fish because it takes some extra force to get that hook point through the rubber of the lure body before it can hook the fish. Some of the swimbaits also have a slit for the hook to ride in to keep the weeds off of it, but it'll still let the hook bury into the fish's mouth.

One of the issues with using soft plastics is with their sharp teeth, pike can chew these up pretty quickly. You can see on this lure we only caught 2 or 3 fish on it and it's pretty cut up. And one of the more common lures that you think of with pike fishing are surface lures.

And there's a very wide variety of these lures out there. You can have the typical frog or a hard bait that floats, a jerkbait. Typically a 3 to 6-inch lure will cover most of your pike fishing applications.

There's hard baits that have parts that spin, and you can have some that look pretty realistic like a little duck. But once again, because they're a hollow rubber, after catching some fish they can get torn up and they may not float real well. Another fun lure to fish for pike with is a buzzbait. This has a blade on it that spins, and this will splash and make noise on the surface This weedless spoon will provide some flash and flutter behind it just under the surface, and these are a really effective way to get some fish to look up and make some strikes on the surface for you.

So let's go fishing.

Right now we're just drifting with the wind, roughly following the shoreline but staying 100 or a couple hundred yards off and fishing around these patches of weeds with open areas in them, looking for some bigger fish. Pike definitely orient towards structure, be it the shoreline or sunken trees or weed beds or lily pads. They like having some cover because they're primarily an ambush predator. Generally, they're sitting and waiting or moving really slowly, hunting for food.

Typically, the larger a pike is, the more willing, the more often they'll use more open water with less cover, because once they get to be in the 10-pound, 30-inch size range, they're pretty safe from other predators. Smaller pike tend to stick closer to the shoreline and in heavier cover. It's not only they have more predators from birds or mammals, but also other pike will happily eat them as well. Oh, got one!

Would you grab the net, please?

Alright, I'm gonna unhook the fish. Should be easy with the barbless hook. And a nice decent pike there.

Let's go get more.

Oh, you got one!

Oh my God, through all the weeds! Swamp monster!

Oh, did you see those little ciscos jump?

Fish on!

Keeping them in the water as much as we can, and rubber landing nets are real nice on them. They don't take the slime off as bad and they're gentle.

Nice fish.

So we've got some weather moving in, big thunderstorm. We're going to keep an eye on it too. There's been some lightning. We don't want to get stuck out here in a lightning storm.

I don't want to get electrocuted today.

Yeah, we're going to want to go real quick here.

So you can see we're— it's getting on to late afternoon, early evening, and got some clouds moving through and We're getting into a good time of day to be fishing. Bite can turn on about now, and we're at another, uh, another confluence of a creek and a, and a slough channel.

And there's a fish! Oh, it's a good one too!

We're gonna need the net for this one.

I'm gonna lead her around head first, right into the net.

Nice fish!

So even though I'm using barbless hooks because we're catch and releasing fish today, um, having a pair of pliers is still really helpful with their bony mouths. Even barbless hooks don't always want to come out real easily. The lures we're using today have all had single hooks. I find it's easier to release fish with them and I do less damage to fish's mouths. We've got a really nice fish here and, uh, We're gonna weigh it.

A lot of people, uh, a lot of scales grab fish by their jaws or by their snout or by their gills. And for these bigger fish especially, that can cause some internal damage as the weight of the fish is pulling on it. So a safer way that's easier on the fish is to keep them in the net bag. And this is where having a rubber net or a knotless mesh net is, uh, really beneficial. And the net bag will cradle the fish when we lift it up to weigh it, so you're never actually hooking the scale to the fish.

Let me get my scale here, and I already know the scale— the— I've weighed the net and it weighs about a pound and a half.

So that— I'll hold that.

That's about a 16.5 or so pound fish. And, uh, another way of keeping track of how big your fish are is to measure them. And so I'm going to keep it in the net bag. The net bag's big enough that we can stretch her out straight. I'm just going to real quickly lift her up and lay her on this measure board.

Once again, I'm kind of trying to cradle the fish.

All right, that's a nice— about a 37-inch fish.

So we'll lift her up. I'm gonna gently cradle her here.

I'm gonna send her on her way now.

Well, we've had a couple of good days of fishing for northern pike here. Caught a lot of fish, had a lot of fun. I hope you've learned something new and what a great sport fish they are, and I hope you can get out and do some sport fishing for northern pike.