Living Flyfishing: Pike from the Belly Boat

Monday, April 16, 2012

Pike from the Belly Boat

The spell seems to be broken after I caught my first fish of the year last week, a seatrout on the west coast, although the day didn't start promising to say the least.

Yesterday, Joakim, Erik and I headed out to one of the millions of small lakes in Sweden to hunt pike from the belly boat. Joakim and Erik borrowed their belly boats from school which might explain why we had to repair one of Eriks leaking chambers before we even got to the water. In addition, to make things worse access to the lake wasn't as easy as we had imagined, so we had to plough our way through 100m of marsh. Terrific, we thought, we won't be able to fish at all before it gets dark.

Finally on the water it didn't take long before both Jocke and Erik caught their first pike. Soon after that, still on the way to our base the big backpack with food on my belly, I hooked a really nice pike. I paddled to the shore and landed the fish, a fat lady around 70cm and 2,5-3kg - my personal best on the fly! This was what I had been working so hard for the last couple of months.

The day continued like that. I caught three more but a little smaller pikes and lost four. All of my fish were lured by a, self-tied of course, chartreuse fly with a little pink and gold flash. I call the pattern MLI. Joakim caught six, among that a really fine pike around 90cm and 4kg, while Erik landed nine pikes. It was amazing to feel the strength of these pike. Even the smaller ones literally hammered our baits. Maybe this was why neither Joakim nor Erik complained about their slowly leaking belly boats. Every time they got out of the belly boat the chambers had to be refilled. It would probably not have been as much fun if one of them had taken a swim in the not so warm lake.

We until the sun disappeared and instantly the fishing died completely. Too cold, too dark for the pike. But one thing is a 100% certain: This definitely wasn't the last time we used the belly boats.