Vol. XCIII 
JULY, 1923 
No. 7 
THE PICKEREL—A TRUE GAME FISH 
When and how to catch them — 
Their habits and fighting quality 
HERE is the angler who can¬ 
not revive fond memories of 
care-free days spent on the 
pickerel pond of his boyhood? 
Your equipment was simple, but ef¬ 
fectual. A cane pole, twelve to four¬ 
teen feet long; a cotton or linen line of 
the same length; a ringed hook, gener¬ 
ally a cheap spear-point Carlisle. You 
preferred the Carlisle because of its 
long shank, which enabled you to ex¬ 
tract it from the pickerel’s mouth with 
the minimum of danger to your fingers. 
A small sinker ten inches above the 
hook — when you couldn’t get the 
“store” sinkers, a ten penny nail did 
very well. You were always careful 
to select a rusty one so it didn’t shine 
in the water and distract the fish’s at¬ 
tention from the bait. The float was 
important. It let you know just when 
the pickerel took hold of the live bait 
and by its erratic movements indicated 
the proper moment to strike, for even 
in the days of your novitiate you had 
learned that the pickerel plays with 
the bait and mouths it, as the cat plays 
with the mouse. You knew that the 
float must be pulled well under the 
water before you dared strike if you 
were to be sure of hooking your quarry. 
And how the fish, once hooked, 
rushed about and churned the water, 
and often leaped into the air (when 
you weren’t pulling too hard yourself) 
in its mad effort to escape the stinging 
barb embedded in its tender mouth; 
how it flopped and thrashed its tail as 
you finally hauled it, gasping, upon the 
bank; how you admired its green re¬ 
ticulated sides and pure white belly; its 
long sharp teeth and lustrous eye 
flashed defiance at you then and there 
—these and a hundred other mental 
Page 357 
By RUBE WOOD 
pictures flit by you, one by one', with 
the memory of the cane pole and the 
weed beds and rushes of the pickerel 
pond. 
Pickerel fishing holds a definite place 
in the affairs of the boy, just as marble 
playing and kite flying. But as the 
boy advances into man’s estate with its 
cares and responsibilities he forgets 
the thrills of pickerel catching in the 
days when cares were few. 
Many anglers, removed from their 
boyhood by more years than they care 
to acknowledge, become so enthralled 
by fly fishing for trout, bass and 
salmon, that if they do think of pick¬ 
erel at all and express their thoughts 
in words, it is in words of disparage¬ 
ment. They refer to the pickerel as a 
snake, “a common fish,” and say it 
can’t fight and isn’t fit to eat. 
That this is all wrong, any angler 
who catches pickerel on light tackle 
will aver. In a certain section of the 
Middle West, I have seen men fish for 
small-mouth bass with the cane pole 
equipment described in the beginning 
of this article. When a fish was 
hooked, it was thrown over the shoul¬ 
der into the bushes whether it weighed 
a half pound or three pounds. If the 
bass were too big for this form of 
treatment, something “busted” and 
that’s all there was to it. It is just 
possible that men who say the pickerel 
is not a game fish have used these 
methods on them. Under these circum¬ 
stances, the black bass becomes re¬ 
moved from the game fish class, also; 
besides almost anything else one can 
think of weighing less than five pounds. 
This does not go to say, however, that 
the cane pole cannot be made a weapon 
of enjoyment in the taking of bass and 
dec r 
pickerel. On the contrary, there are 
many anglers who enjoy catching these 
game fish by this means, and derive 
plenty of sport from so doing, simply 
because they play their fish as care¬ 
fully as though they were using a four- 
ounce fly rod. Remember also that 
they are handicapped by lack of a reel 
and the fish often pulls loose by mak¬ 
ing a hard rush. 
The pickerel will not last as long in 
battle as the bass or trout, it i§ true, 
but this is not due to lack of a cour¬ 
ageous spirit, but rather to the fact 
that nature gave it a long slim body 
seemingly out of all proportion to the 
fishes’ length. A black bass, when 
hooked, having a far wider body than 
that of the pickerel, will warp himself 
around in a curve at right angles to 
the line and thereby (with the aid 
of the resistance to the water thus 
formed) exert such a pressure on the 
line and hook as to reach the danger 
point; indeed, he often escapes by 
means of this ruse. Though the pick¬ 
erel makes use of this same trick, it 
avails him little as his body is too cylin¬ 
drical to “get a grip” on the water, 
and as he has no such means as this, 
whereby he may have a “breathing 
spell” now and then, he needs must give 
up quickly. 
What the pickerel lacks in lasting 
power, he surely makes up for in speed. 
Built as he is, like a greyhound, he is 
the swiftest fish that swims in fresh 
water. Hooked on a light rod and small 
light lure, a pickerel’s first few rushes 
are apt to astonish the angler. A fish 
weighing three pounds will make a dash 
of sixty feet in an incredibly short time. 
He will often terminate this with a leap 
of two feet, and if the angler keeps his 
Contents Copyrighted by Forest and Stream Pub. Co. 
