How did you spear your monster? Was the water clear? Was the wind blowing? Did the pike come in slow or fast as a bullet? Email me your awesome spearing stories and I will post it here for all to enjoy!
It was around 2:00 am on January 13, 1995. My best friend Chris Motteberg and I were heading home from the Casino in Mahnomen, talking about spearing “the big one”. We decided to head up north and give it another try. After a couple hours of sleep, we were on the road to Lake of the Woods………… The ice auger, with an extension, barely made it through the thick ice and sawing the rest of the two holes by hand was an exhausting chore. It was about 11:00am and I had been seeing fish all morning. They were definitely “running”! Chris had just left my house to see how I was doing when I thought I saw a “camera flash” in the hole. (Later I learned the “flash” was the side of a monster pike that was leaving the hole quickly.) I had my spear in hand, waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, from the front of the ice hole, I saw a very large creature approaching my twirling red and white daredevil. As it slowly came further into the hole, I lowered my spear and was able to hit it right behind the gills. Immediately, I knew this one was going to be big, so I started trying to get my friends attention. By the time Chris made it over to my house, I had gotten her to the surface of the water. Coming out of the hole was a challenge however…… She tipped my stove over, ripped the canvas, and almost knocked over my chair into the water! When we finally got her onto the ice, we couldn’t believe what we were looking at! She measured 46.5 inches and by the time I got her to an official scale, she weighed 28.3 pounds. This will truly be a day I remember for the rest of my life!
- John Bohnenkamp
It was Dec. 1st and it was a bright sunny morning. I was there for a monster Pike. Lake of the Woods out of Warroad is a good place to look when big Pike is what you have on your mind. I had a back that was out of place so, even sitting in a fish house was a chore. There was very little snow so banking up your house was even a bigger chore. I lowered down an 8 inch sucker minnow and leaned back in my chair to rest my sore back when just like a bullet a big Pike hit the sucker minnow and started going out with it in her big jaws. I grabbed the spear and let it fly and hit her perfectly behind the head, then the fight was on. I just held the rope without letting her get to the bottom and used my arms as a shock absorber and let her go around and around till the fight was over. I slowly got her out of the water, because of my back, not the fish. I got her off the spear and measured her at 45 and one half inches, so with the formula should of been 26.9lbs. That night we took her up to the store and weighed her in at about 25.5lbs. We all go up there fishing with a ten dollar bet on who gets the biggest fish so the prize money helped getting it mounted Thanks again to one of my son in laws (Mike Hron} it's now hanging on my wall and I call her the bad back fish paid for by the family.
-Louie Doyea
