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Fort Peck Pike

MThuntr

MThuntr

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 9, 2009
Messages
6,459
Location
In the Sagebrush of SW Montana
A couple weeks ago we hit Fort Peck at Hell Creek to find a few fish. We don't own ATVs so it was all on foot dragging gear up to 2 miles on the ice. We couldn't find any walleye or decent sized perch so we changed plans and focused on northerns. The fish were big fans of giant minnows or herring on fluorocarbon leader which is contrary to the ideal that steel leaders were necessary. In fact steel leaders were outfished 5 to 1 and produced the largest northerns too. It seems we were the only ones catching any amount of fish that weekend which made our spot a famous stopping point for guys on ATVs. The largest few were released and we feel we should have released more and kept some "eater" sized fish instead.

Here's my attempt to one-up MTMiller's fishing pics ;)

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Awesome Pike, well done, Looks like a blast !! I haven't run any tip-ups here yet this winter but I also use fluoro leaders, usually 50# tied directly to the hook, no snaps. Another trick I use which has helped a lot is when using dead smelt I will put a live medium sized minnow on one of the hooks. The added flash really helps I believe. When using chubs we trim half of their tail off so they can't dart away from pike as fast. If I run short on chubs I will also use "double meat" on a treble hook. Hook two of your biggest minnows through the back on a treble hook, facing opposite directions. When one struggles it makes the other one struggle. They don't cover much ground, and are easy for the fish to catch. Also works great with smaller fluoro leader, smaller treble hook and medium minnows for walleyes. Often outfishes a single minnow 3:1
 
Awesome fishing, even better to hear you pulled sleds 2 miles. Good ice where I was, so pick-up was nice and close. Are you going to be making another trip?
 
mtmiller said:
Awesome fishing, even better to hear you pulled sleds 2 miles. Good ice where I was, so pick-up was nice and close. Are you going to be making another trip?
Click to expand...

No it's just too far for a second trip especially since we didn't catch any walleye I'm not so excited about it.

Holy crap!!! I hope there's pickled pike at the bear hunt
Click to expand...

I'm going to experiment with a recipe that was given to me yesterday so we'll see how it turns out

Nice fish, and good job on protecting the resource by releasing the biggest ones.
Click to expand...

In hindsight we should have put more of the medium to larger sized fish back and kept some of the smaller ones. All of the large fish we caught were female and were full of eggs which is apparently the rule when they get that big. We postulated that the larger females were a year or so old when we had all of the flooding in 2011/2012. Those floods created a good food source for fast growth. Looking as some of the published data suggests we may be close at our guess.
 
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