Bigger than my net!

Fed up of blanking on my new club water, I'm off to where I started my pike journey with The Bishop last season.

First cast and 15 minutes later I've landed a six pounder on sardine. It's an old friend identified by it's slightly deformed jaw. A long lean fish, it should probably weigh two or three pounds more. She is unhooked quickly and swims off to fight another day.

No bites in the next two pegs. I decide to poke my rods through a three foot wide gap in the bankside trees. No room to cast, so it's a case of swinging the baits out, and they land barely twenty feet from where I'm stood. After twenty minutes there's a bob on the right hand rod and after another five the float sails away. As I tighten into the fish, the overhanging branches restrict my rod movements...

After a couple of powerful runs, up she comes and she fools me into thinking she's ready to net.

Here goes... wow, that's a BIG broad head... EFFING HELL!!.... she's bigger then my net... must be a TWENTY !! :-))

Within a second she's in the net but in another she's inexplicably out of it! Then a trailing hook catches a submerged branch. For a few seconds I've got the branch and fish on, then the inevitable happens... all goes slack and she's gone.

It was the biggest pike I have ever seen and it takes me a good ten minutes to stop shaking. My nice new net is 36 inches front to back and she was at least this long. What struck me was the size and breadth of her head - so differently proportioned to the pike I have caught so far.

In virtual darkness and after three hours, three more pegs and no bites, I pack up and head home, with plans to go back for 'you know who' in the next week!

Session stats: 1 x 6lb (est) pike sardine in 9 feet  @ 11.00 + 1 lost fish (sardine) @ 13.45. No other bites. Baits used sardine, lamprey, roach, mackerel, smelt. 10.45 to 16.30hrs. 8C Flat calm at first becoming 5mph west. High thin cloud becoming drizzly towards dusk. 11.5 rod hours in 5 pegs (9 to 16 feet) on 3 pits.