Caught my first pike jigging…

So last winter I watched my half-brother pull a pike out of the hole with his jig pole, after the northern tangled up and taking my line with it.. Well today I got my chance… Either she didn’t find the shiners on the tip-ups or hadn’t made it to them yet.. Took my minnow on a blue jig and ran with it… Got the vex out of the water and after fighting a bit, got it up to the top of the water and “SNAP” don’t know why I didn’t have the gaf ready, but natural instinct kicked in and was able to grab her behind the gills… 26 1/2″ (just legal on that lake) 3lb4oz… Made a nice dinner with the bass I caught on a tip up.. Even took the time to figure out finally how to fillet the y-bones out… Had caught over 100 pike last year and should have learned then but ended up pickling most of them.. Hopefully the wind dies down tomorrow so I’m not constantly cleaning out tip up holes, but definantly was making ice today with all the cracking going on…

Congrats on your catch..
btw Nice to see a sister member on the forum

More women need to fish.

Congratulations Jen!! Thanks for sharing. I’ve always said those pike make excellent tablefare. I’ve found through guiding that many anglers initially frown upon eating Pike. Still when properly cleaned and cared for the Northern Pike coming out of cold water is simply excellent. Coming from a guy fishing a lake filled with Crappies and Walleyes; I’ll jump over either one of them for Baked Pike or Fried Whitefish!!

Dandy’s!

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ended up pickling most of them

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I LOVE pickled pike! I can’t eat herring ever since Ms Fishing Machine’s pickled pike.

Jen, post your recipe in the Recipes forum sometime.

There ya go BK, recipe is in the recipe forum..

Nice fish. I like pickled pike to but 100 pickled northerns is a lot of fish. Growing up pike where the main fish we at. Battered and fried. Great eating fish. They do tend to run dryer than say a walleye so we learned to cook them quickly to not dry them out. Think the ones I fried a week or so back only cook a couple of minutes on each side in hot oil.

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There ya go BK, recipe is in the recipe forum.

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The worst pike I’ve ever had was the pike that was in the freezer for 6 months to a year. I’ll never do that again!

Yeah it was a lot of fish, my half-brother owns a house on a small lake, there are pike, bass, crappies, and gills in it.. Every two or three years we fish the hell out of the northerns cause no one else really ice fishes it or summer-fishes it (public access is a bunch of grass grown up and trees lol)… If we don’t do it, the crappies and gills and bass decrease in numbers and size dramatically… So just trying to do our part in keeping some of the other fish in there…
and of course my half-brother never wanted to take any fish home, so I was stuck cleaning them and figuring out what to do with them, but he was more than willing to take some pickeled fish…
Tonight we just deep fried the fillets and they were very tasty, just need to make sure your oil is hot enough to fry them quick enough..
And ty to the others for the congrats, was very happy with the jig catch…

Congrats on a nice catch Jen!

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More women need to fish.

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Yeah!!!

Mark