Northern Pike Techniques and Tips

Gone fishing - that's where I usually was. In the fall it was gone to fish for walleyes and northerns. Anything else we caught was an accident. Here another of the northern pike fishing techniques for newbies to catch big northerns.

One day my dad heard the northerns were biting on a small, hard to get to, out of the way, little lake that was back in the middle of a cow pasture. The road to the fishing lake was more of a trail and it's a good thing I had a pickup as my car wouldn't have made it back in there.



We were the only people there and I picked a spot on a small point where an arm of water that wandered back into the pasture started. It was fall and I figured the northern pike might be going into the shallows on the arm to bask in the sun and then come back to the deeper water to feed.

We baited up with large smelt and put the Dr. Juice on. My bait had hardly hit the water and I had a bite and caught a 9 pound northern after a bit of a struggle. While I was catching my fish my dad got a bite and was fighting his and then my wife got a bite too. 3 fish on at once and we hadn't been there for more than 5 minutes.

To make this long story shorter we fished for approximately 30 minutes and had our limits of northern pike again. They ranged from 7 to 10 pounds. So we packed up and went home to clean fish.

The next day we were gone northern fishing again, back to the exact same spot and there were two older guys, a few years older than my dad, fishing about 25 yards south of where we had been fishing the day before. My dad and I wandered down to talk to them and to see if anything was biting. They told us they had heard the northerns were biting like crazy but they hadn't had a bite and they'd been there for a couple of hours. They were using big suckers and catching nothing. Then I knew this was going to really be fun.

We got out our gear, baited up with smelt, juiced up and immediatly started catching fish again. We had reeled in our second northern of around 9 pounds and both old guys came down to look at our fish and see if they could figure out what we were doing that we were catching fish and they weren't.

While they saw the smelt we never let them see us putting the Dr. Juice on them. Then they started complaining that we were just lucky and in the right place at the right time. Being somewhat of a smart ass now and then I told them luck had nothing to do with it, they just flat out didn't know how to fish for northerns. Made them both mad and they went back to their spot.

We caught our limits of northern pike again in about the same amount of time and they all ran about the same size again. The two older guys never had a bite all the time we were there. When we packed up to leave they started picking up their stuff and when we were driving away they were settling in to the spot we had just left. I don't know if the caught anything or not and didn't really care.

I had now proved to my own satisfaction that Dr. Juice on large suckers worked way better than non juiced suckers and juice on smelt was better than non juiced smelt. Oh, my dad was convinced too and I never saw him again with out Dr. Juice northern scent in his tackle boxes.

This little juice trick is something I haven't shared with many people because it just works so well. I did have one thing left to learn about smelt, juice and northern pike techniques tho and that was during ice fishing.

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