Lake George – It isn’t realistic to expect that fishing for northern pike deep into autumn suddenly will become the next rave on the Colorado outdoor scene.
Not with deer, elk, ducks, pheasants and even the seasonal attractions of spawning trout vying for the attention of those brave souls who haven’t already come in from the cold.
But maybe it should. Ron Gazvoda thinks so. Ditto Mark Elliott. Both fervently believe that these waning days before freeze-up provide the best opportunity to catch the largest pike in a lake, perhaps the most as well.
Gazvoda, a Lakewood resident and a successful member of the Professional Walleye Tour, does his pike fishing with lures, primarily at Elevenmile Reservoir. Elliott fishes with flies at Stagecoach Reservoir, not far from his home in Steamboat Springs.
One might explain Gazvoda’s fall mania at least in part by the fact he spends late spring and summer pounding the national walleye circuit. Autumn happens to be when he has time. Elliott, on the other hand, targets pike whenever there’s open water. It’s just that he gets the big ones when frost forms on his nose.
At this point, feel free to pencil in your own personal theories why northern pike go on the bite toward the end of October and remain available until ice forms along the shore.
The list might include the water temperature swing that brings these cool-water fish back into relatively shallow water after spending the hot months in the depths.
Or the fact that they generally haven’t been targeted by anglers since early July, thus losing a bit of the edginess you find in mature pike exposed to intense fishing pressure, Colorado style.
In these politically correct times, we’re not saying that autumn pike are dumb. But they may have lost a step while lolling deep down there out of the heat.
Gazvoda became enamored of Elevenmile pike as a kid growing up in Colorado Springs.
“This was where my grandfather brought me all the time,” he recalled halcyon days of fishing from what he remembers “a little tub” of a boat.
Now Gazvoda operates from the considerably more sophisticated platform of an 19 1/2-foot Princecraft all tricked out with the latest electronics. What this fancy equipment told him on an outing last Friday was that the water temperature remained a tepid 50 degrees, yet another hangover from what has been an uncommonly mild Indian summer.
Gazvoda had been hoping for at least 5 degrees cooler, allowing him to peg the pike to certain transition zones he has stamped on a mental map. He most frequently finds larger pike at around 20 feet along the trailing edges of weed beds.
To catch them, he retrieves soft-plastic jigs slowly along bottom, just enough movement to make the tail twitch enticingly. Chartreuse is the almost constant color of choice. Gazvoda spurns wire leaders, taking his chances on a quick hook set.
“If you hook them before they swallow the lure, you don’t get bitten off very often,” he said of the notorious razor teeth.
Neither Gazvoda nor his companion had a whole lot to worry about from pike teeth Friday, one of those strange days that defy both explanation and prediction.
At a place normally teeming with bird life, no wings ever appeared in a restless, wandering sky. A solitary loon, pausing on its southward migration, idled vacantly near the middle of the lake, never diving for food.
Considering this lack of animation, perhaps it came as no surprise that, apart from occasional juveniles – hammer handles, if you prefer – pike kept their mouths shut. The lone exception was a larger fish that chomped the lure, tugged strongly and then parted the line of an angler who obviously hadn’t learned to set the hook quickly.
Gazvoda’s pike lament includes the fact that there seems to be fewer of them than a few years ago, in part the result of a Division of Wildlife management initiative aimed at eliminating their food supply in waters managed primarily for trout.
The toothy predators were introduced to several reservoirs in the early 1970s to trim sucker populations. That they also gobbled lots of trout seemed to come as a shock to fish managers who have spent recent years trying to get rid of them.
With few exceptions, DOW has removed pike bag limits statewide, effectively creating the image of a fish with a bull’s-eye on its chest.
“It seems to me as if the thing with pike has come full circle,” Gazvoda observed. “At first they were trying to eliminate suckers. Now they’re trying to do the same with the pike.”
The way he said it, you would think they were taking away at his boyhood memories as well.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” radio KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
