Handling A Northern Pike When You Didn’t Mean To Catch One
When you are fishing for trout, and especially if you are practicing catch and release, you would seek and adhere to advice for how to handle a trout once you have caught it. Your consideration in handling the trout would be for the trout, not yourself; that consideration being how to unhook the trout and return it back to the water in a way that causes the least amount of trauma and injury to the fish.
This consideration is altogether different when you are fishing for northern pike. When you seek and adhere to advice for how to handle a northern pike once you have it caught, what should be foremost in your mind is how to prevent injury and trauma to yourself first, and the fish, second.
This presumes that you are intending to catch a northern pike when you go fishing. If not, and you managed to hook one while fishing for bluegill or walleye, then you might want to adhere to advice from old-timers familiar with the injury that northern pike can cause an angler. The advice goes like this – bash it in the head with whatever you can use that will do the job and keep bashing it in the head until it is dead. This might offend sensibilities when you tell the story, but you will be telling the story without a stitched-up gash in your leg or worse.
Northern pike have razor sharp teeth, grow large and are strong fish built for rapid acceleration through the water. These fish can take off in a burst to catch prey. They are sleek and strong and will go crazy once you pull it into the boat. As if this were not enough for you to grab a paddle and start whacking one that you didn’t intend to catch, the inside of their gills also contain razor sharp bone. A slash is bad enough, think of what could happen if a large, multi-hook lure barbs you while the pike is thrashing around in the boat. Can you imagine the tearing injury that you would receive from that?
Unless you know what you are doing, there is no safe, “made up on the fly” way to grab a northern pike. If you are actually trying to catch one when you go fishing, then please get an experienced pike angler or guide to show you the safe way to handle them before you catch one, both on shore and especially in the boat. Preferably you will watch how this is done before you attempt it yourself.
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