A very Unusual Pike…
I’ve caught plenty of pike over the years but this one was a little bit special. Fishing with the Duke in Norway, we found ourselves on Mjosa, the country’s biggest inland water. And when I say big I mean big! Mjosa is bigger than Lough Corrib and twice as scary.
While the above fish was caught in the daytime it was by no means typical of the other pike that we caught.
The pike in Mjosa are very unusual because they don’t behave like any other pike that either myself or the Duke have ever encountered. While some of the fish inhabited typical bays and reefs, the majority are open-water predators that lie suspended over deep water. Following huge shoals of freshwater smelt, these pike behave and hunt just like ferox trout. In the daytime they lie deep, migrating to the surface to hunt smelt at night. We caught several by trolling over deep water with shallow lures. Catching fish just a few feet down while trolling over six hundred feet of water in the middle of the night has to count as one of my most memorable and unusual angling experiences!Â