>>2846839Amazing eating. Definitely very consistently in my top 3 favorite freshwater eating fish.I got this guy sometime before noon, to be fair I casted out a line at sun-up and checked at 12 due to forgetfulness and he was on good. Had a fairly large jig on with a pretty big minnow hooked thru the tail.
>>2846841yeh im getting better at excising the y-bones. personally I can eat around them but im also fine with "losing" some meat by cutting liberally.
>>2846842That might be from someone who was confused/got mixed up in the whole "walleye/pickerel/pike" thing that happens in some places. I only say that because walleye are absolutely active at night while night pike is universally a rarity among everyone I know who fishes a lot. I typically only see pike at night chilling near some weeds, they might bite if you manage to get your bait right infront of them but they don't seem to prowl or ambush as much come nightfall. prolly a sight thing.
Definitely difficult to "oversize" your baits when it comes to pike, researchers fairly often find pike choked to death on pike that were nearly the exact same size as them. They are voracious eaters during the day in my experience both stationary and trolling but they LOVE hitting a bait that's trolling gingerly past their lines of sight. They don't have a dorsal fin which allows them to just suspend in the water column staring forward before making an S-shape in their body while they kind of coarsely charge their prey, making a C-shape with their body to stop. Their physiology and the advantages it brings is interesting.
TLDR: jigs with worms/minnows of any size work just fine, as do various crankbaits/raps/whatever so long as you work them. In my experience they want minnows more than worms.
I have a thing where I don't like posting unless im also postingfish so here's another big clump of tiny bullheads balling up at night time
