lough erin

[smarr7]

i'm heading to lough erin on saturday, we're gonna camp out an fish overnight, can't wait lol. Was a 42lb pike caught there couple of weeks ago! Will do a report when i come home.... Anyone know anything about it? An where to fish?

[smarr7]

Well we set off from home at about 9am, and had a 2hr drive ahead of us. We arrived at our location at around 1:30, after going to tesco for the necessary beverages and bbq's and stuff. This was our first time at the lough so we didn't really have much knowledge on where to fish.

We found somewhere we could pitch a tent anyway, and got our rods set up and into the water. I was fishing a (can't remember the name of it) langwray or somethin, its kinda like an eel, and one of the most prehistoric fish left on earth. its stomach consists of a bag of blood, i fished it off the bottom while the other 3 had floats on and various baits from salmon - mackrel. it was quite windy and there were boats coming up and down our swim all day , i had the first run after about 2hrs, only to strike slack line and lose it .

This gave us abit of hope even with the boats there, my brother then got a run, and he lost it aswell. We were getting abit pissed off at this stage. and as the day went on the light began to fade.

I had heard in the past that pike fed solely on vision so i wasn't very confident of catching at night, altho i told the other guys that it was perfectly normal to catch at night. lol keep their spirits high.

After about an hour into darkness, around 9:30, my rod started bouncing on and off the rod rests, i grabbed my rod tightened up my line and struck into a clonker, fought with it for about 10minutes and knew i had something big on as my arm was sore from playin it.

I got it in and got it netted, to find it is a PB, i am not sure on weight as we had no scales, im totally gutted i forgot them. but this was definately a pb. looked easily 20lb. The picture dosent do it any justice, it dosent show how fat she was.





What weight u guys reckon from them pics? but as i say, the pictures don't show the brethe of its back.

About an hour later one of the guys had another run but after taking him 5mins to get up an go over to his rod he totally missed it lol.

We retired to bed at about 12:30 and didn't leave rods out ( how stupid of us ).

We got up again 7am and got straight back to the fishing, we fished that spot till about 12am and then moved elsewhere as nothing was happening, the next place we got had same problem with boats. And really really windy conditions. So we decided we would go get some food around 4:30 and then try somewhere else for couple of hours. After we had the KFC we decided just to go home.

On the way home the maggots bust all over the boot and being the only one not afraid to touch them i had to sit and pick every last one of them out! took about an hour, eventually got home around 8pm. was a good weekend, we just didnt find a very good spot to fish, altho i was rewarded with the clonker for keeping my rod in the one place for 9hrs lol.

[smarr7]

hi ... lol

[BoldBear]

Great Pike, well done

I'm no Pike expert and have only caught a few of any size but it looks around 25lb at least.
Buller states that according to 'Monas Scale' a 20lb pike is around 40" and a 30lb Pike is arouind 46" but many anglers including Walker didn't hold a lot of stead to Monas Scale.

NB. I'm sure I read in Barrie Rickards & Ray Webbs - fishing for big Pike that Pike do use their taste/smell glands to home in on food especially during darkness, and there were experiments where deadbaits were put into ditches that led away from the water and during the night Pike found their way up the ditches after following the scent of the deadbaits.
Plus I have heard of plenty of Pike caught at night by other anglers.

[smarr7]

your right mate, have a small confession to make, we had scales but couldn't believe they only said 12lb, knew it couldn't be right, we realised tonight that it was kilograms we were looking at which translates to around 26.5lbs well citede