When my interest for pike fishing re-ignited some years ago, it was mainly due to the amazing movie "Gäddfeber" from Sweden, featuring Stefan "Trumman" Trumstedt and Torbjörn "Buster" Odén. These two guys had a once in a life time fishing experience, catching numerous 10+ pikes. As far as I know, they mainly used Buster Jerk baits.
I got hooked on jerk bait fishing (or glider baits as they're called in the US) and this has been my favorite fishing method for pike... maybe until now.
The last few years, spin fishing with rubber baits/shads/jigs has become seriously popular. Jerk bait is still popular, but not like, say, 10 years ago.
I bought some shads a couple of years ago, but I had much more confidence in jerk baits - and hence I mainly fished jerk baits. However, this changed a bit this summer. I was lucky and found the right spot at the right time. The spot I'm talking about is in a small area which is well known by locals to hold big pike. I haven't had any luck what so ever in this area though. Anyway, this summer all this changed. By chance I was trying some shads in this area.
The bottom structure and depths there are pretty weird actually. It's in a small bay. The depths here are everywhere from 0.5 meters to 20 meters in a pretty small area. In the area where it's a bit deeper, there are also big variations. One spot holds 2 meters of water while if you turn around in the boat and cast 2-3 meters back, you have 7 meters of water. Right in the middle of all this there is a small hole in the structure, which holds about 2 meters of water. This hole is where things happened for me this summer. I caught my first 10+ pike there and I lost 3-4 more possibly 10+ fish there in just a couple of days. The thing was that the water level had dropped about 0.5 to 1 meter the night before, but was still not at the summer lowest. Also, the air temperature had just started rising quite a bit, so there were lots of important changes going on at the same time. Now when the water is at the lowest, this spot has produced nothing what so ever. It was just a 2-3 day window where it was hot.
Anyway, the point is that the fish I caught (and lost) hit on rubber shads. I tried jerk baits among a lot of different types of lures over the same spot, but it turned out that it was the rubber shads that did the trick. Why? I have no idea. It was not the size that tipped the scale, because some of the other baits I tried where approximately the same size (around 15cm). After this I have a new found love for rubber shads. I have invested in some new ones (Pig Shad among other things) and had pretty good success with that.
Don't get me wrong though. I haven't excluded other types of baits. I still fish a lot of jerk baits and I love it as much as before - but I would rather see it like this: I have broadened my fishing. I have more strings to play on, so to speak. But at the moment, I must say that jerk bait and rubber shads are my favorite baits to fish for pike. There's nothing like the feeling of a big hit while spin fishing!
When we (Team Riverpigs) fish competitions, we troll a lot. Mainly because we usually then fish waters that we aren't too familiar with and hence don't know the best spots. Therefore our strategy is to cover as much water as possible - hoping this will increase our changes of catching bigger fish. We are fishing Nedre Glomma Gjeddefestival 2016 in a couple of weeks, and this being our second year, we have gained knowledge of a couple of good spots where we'll try some spin fishing. Crossing our fingers!
Cheers, and good luck with those monster pike!
