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Pike get and give no quarter. Except the lowly burbot, the pike is the only freshwater fish native to both hemispheres. So it is strong testimony to their survival skills that they flourish even where past methods include shooting, choking, netting, stranding, gaffing, nightlining, marooning, stunning, pitchforking and trimming -- the last is a sort of Britannic jug fishing. The "sporting" British did worse than that too! In 1801 the Reverend W.B. Daniel, in his book Rural Sports, suggested readers tie a minnow-baited line to a goose's foot and let the goose haul the pike into the bank! The Reverend Daniel noted, "The goose usually won." With such arcane methods it's no wonder that of the top 100 pike of all time, Europeans have captured 99. Still, American's can't tout their sportsmanship either. Vermont has a short season where pike are shot during spawning!
The only American pike to break into the top 100 is Peter Dubuc's 46-pound, 2-ounce fish, the current North American record. It was caught more than 50 years ago in 1940 from New York's Sacandaga Lake. According to Ron Kolodziej, a well-known outdoor writer and guide on the lake, "No photo of the fish exists. I've looked for photos for a couple of years. I heard Dubuc didn't want to pay $52.50 to have his fish stuffed and mounted. So he ate the fish. He died, and I can't even find the relatives." While details seem lost in the confusion of W.W.II, and a few skeptics doubt the size of the fish, it seems well-authenticated. Since it cost $1 an inch to mount fish then, the fish was 52 1/2-inches long. Klodziej notes, "Dubuc owned a cabin on the lake and was a regular on the water. A compulsive fisherman, he also tied for the New York State Largemouth record. He reportedly took the fish on 12 pound test line with a 4-foot copper leader. Nobody knows the details except that the fight lasted nearly an hour." Since the fish was almost certainly a female -- big pike are almost without exception females -- it could have contained two or three pounds of eggs just before spawning. Nobody bothered to check out the cleaned weight. The fish could have been holding three to six pounds of ingested baitfish too. So the weight seems consistent with the length.
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Even a pretty large fish looks small in comparison to the records.
