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Deadbaiting for Pike 1

By Alan Tomkins

After 2 hours, with no movement whatsoever, the E.T. backbiter arm drops back to lie almost parallel with the rod rest, and the noisy speaker breaks the silence. At the end of the line is a very dead sardine - they don't move on their own - something has picked it up. That is one of the best moments in fishing, a take you have a little time to savour, to anticipate what may be down there for a few seconds before tightening into the fish.

Dead-baiting for pike is one of my favourite fishing methods. The E.T. indicators I use are generally impervious to bad weather conditions, and when they move, it means only one thing - a pike. Many anglers I know are put off using deadbaits, because the fishing can be tediously slow. In my early days of fishing deadbaits, I really struggled to catch pike. There were, I think, two main reasons for this. One was that I was blindly following tradition, and chucking out either herring, or sprat.

Good baits though these are on their day, on the waters I fish at least, there are many days when other baits will outfish them. The second reason was that I failed to realise that there are some waters that definitely respond better to livebaits, and I was often to be found ledgering my demised offerings in these places. I know some very famous, and very good pike anglers have said that they can catch pike on deadbaits from any water. That may be so, but I feel they may be spending more time fishing than someone like myself, who is lucky to get out piking once a week during the winter. On some waters I have worked very hard to catch pike on deadbaits while people all around have been hammering them on livebaits. "Ah" you may say, "but deadbaits catch the big ones". Well, yes they do, but so do livebaits. I now feel that I have to make the best of my limited time by keeping all my options open. Anyway, having realised that some waters responded better to deadbaits than others, I began to concentrate on the deadbait waters. These didn't seem to fall into any category. Some waters were to all intents and purposes very similar, but would fish totally differently. So the first message if you want to catch pike on deadbaits on a regular basis is to find the right water. But be aware that waters do change - I have fished several waters where I have been told by the locals that pike will only take livebaits, and have gone on to make some good bags of fish on the static deadbait. I have not yet encountered a water where success fluctuated between the two methods from day to day. Though I know waters which have varied in this manner from season to season, I have never known one to vary greatly from day to day, whatever the weather conditions. I'm not saying this applies to all waters, as obviously there are thousands of waters I haven't fished. If I were to fish five days a week, all over the country, I may hold different opinions. My views are based on my own, quite successful, experiences.

The next things I looked at were the baits I was using, and the presentation of them. Herring and sprat had produced a few fish, and some good ones, but didn't seem very consistent. Mackerel has never been a very successful bait for me, though I have to be honest and say it has been largely neglected due to the success of my favourite three deadbaits - sardine, trout and eel section. These were firmly established before the smelt boom, and I must admit that that peculiar smelling fish has also worked it's way into my list of favourites - providing they are fresh. This does seem important. The first time I used smelt was many many years ago, when my son brought back a brace from a day's fishing in the estuary. I took them out, had two pike in about 15 minutes, then couldn't get any more smelts for about 5 years. This year I was lucky - I walked into a fishmongers and was immediately hit with the over-powering smell of cucumber. There on the ice lay about 4 dozen smelts, all superbly fresh, and most of them around 6 inches long. I bought the lot, at about half the price you pay in the tackle shops, and had some excellent pike on them. So while I do take the odd exotic bait with me, for the moment at least I am concentrating on the four mentionned above, and if you do the same you will have a good chance of a pike picking one of them up. You should endeavour to keep them fresh. I always freeze my deadbaits, and take them to the water in a coolbag together with a couple of icepacks. On most winter days, they stay frozen all day and can be put back into the freezer when I get home. While on the subject of bait transportation, if you, like me, get fed up with mopping up the car every time you carry bait buckets with water in, no matter how tight fitting the lids seem to be, you might like to try an idea which not only saves the car carpets from a soaking, but to some extent aerates the water as well. I sew a double thickness of sacking around a wire hoop shaped to fit tightly an inch or so below the rim of the bucket. This absorbs water that may splash up, and the water aerates as it drips back. This device kept my car dry through the whole of last winter, whereas in previous years, come March 15th. I have had about 2 inches of very smelly water slopping about in the under-floor tool space at the back.

Getting back to the script, all of the aforementionned baits can be cast a good distance frozen. You can "sidehook" eel sections with either single hooks, doubles or trebles. Smelts I mount with one hook in the tail root, and the other somewhere along the flank. I use a baiting needle to mount sardines, and get quite a few casts out of them even after they have thawed out. They are not really extreme range baits, though a frozen trout will go quite a long way, and so will a small piece of eel with a 2-3 ounce lead.

The other bonus with these baits is that you don't miss many runs, especially with sardines which seem to have close to a 100% hooking rate on the hooking arrangements I use. Which brings me conveniently onto rigs. It must be quite a few years now since Vic Bellars wrote his original article describing the VB double pike hooks. Most of you will be familiar with them by now, as they are readily obtainable. But at the time, you had to make them yourself, and I spent many happy(!) hours affixing small singles to the backs of big ones with a combination of solder, glue, whipping silk and prayer. And they certainly worked, as do the ones I buy from the shops now. They are an excellent hooker, when used in the right bait. The right bait is a softish one, such as the sardine, or the smelt. I also use them on eel sections where it is easy to make the bigger of the two hooks stand out from the bait. On a 3 inch section of eel you only need one hook, and if you hook it through the skin at the end of the section, you should have no trouble in hooking the pike. You will quite likely get your bait back too - on one occasion I caught 3 doubles in half an hour on the same piece of eel. On the larger rainbow trout, which have quite a tough skin, I usually use trebles, though even then have lost pike on occasions.

I have tried several versions of the breakaway rigs, incorporating such things as power gum, PVA, broken hooks (as casting links) etc., but in the end it all became a bit fiddly, and as the other three baits were producing so many fish, I have to some extent latterly abandonned the trout. So, on the deadbaits I usually fish, the VB double hook seems to work at least as well as the treble. Personally, I think it is superior, and may even increase your run rate as, unlike the treble, in many instances it will flatten onto the bait when the pike picks it up whereas it may be possible that a treble, sticking up rigidly, may be detected by the pike, causing it to drop the bait. On most of my deadbait traces these days you will find either one, or two VB doubles, and I usually use the bigger of the two sizes available, which I think is a size 4, though it is a big size 4!

The trace itself is a minimum of 15 inches long - I strongly recommend you do the same. I flatten the barb on the bigger hook of the lower of the pair, or if I am only using one hook, I flatten that. The reason I only flatten the lower hook is that is the one likely to be furthest down. This probably makes little difference in practice as they get hooked on the small hook as often as they do on the big one. That doesn't worry me overmuch, as virtually all my pike are hooked in the mouth.

That is the advantage of using small or soft baits. You can strike almost straight away every time, with the virtual certainty of hooking the pike. You may miss the occasional small one, but I don't worry about that too much. I'd rather that than have a good pike deep hooked. One thing worth saying about the VB hooks is that if you do get a pike take one down, the Deep throat disgorgers, which work very well with trebles, are virtually useless with these doubles. (or if they do work, will someone tell me how?) So always go prepared for the worst, and take long artery forceps, and long handled wire cutters. Strike early and you won't have that trouble. Next month I'll look at bite indication, fishing methods, and other related matters.