Meter pike beautys!

It's been some time since my last post in the blog. We're now in high season for our regular camping season and our focus on fishing is low as usual for this time of the year. The midsummer weekend is just ended and as always this means a full campsite. All cabins was booked and about 350 campers/caravans has been visiting us during this long weekend. For sure busy times for us and more or less no time for anything else than reception duties. Fortunately, I had a day off yesterday and spent a half day on the water.

I went out on my own and did so with a good feeling. Weather looked great with lots of clouds, strong wind from SW and water level a bit over normal. Only about 15-16 degrees in the air and yes, it was pike friendly conditions!

In my first casts of the day I had several followers of decent size on my brand new Renz-Stein lures "Beastly tail 32". The interest soon resulted in a good strike over 2,5m of water. The fish was super strong and I realized that this fish was for sure a good sized lady. Several times she rushed and pulled plenty of line of my reel. Fortunately, I had prepared my net before I started fishing and this helped me to land the fish easily. The first fish of the day showed up to be 104cm long and was of excellent condition. Great colours and extremely healthy fish.

When I go out on my own I use a spider grip mount for my camera to be able to capture the fish I might catch. This makes it a lot easier and faster to release the fish again. Strongly recommended advice if you go out on your own!

Anyhow, I continued and just a few casts later I striked yet another good fish. A golden beauty of 93cm was the second fish of the day (picture 3). Only minutes later a 85cm was caught. After this, the clouds decided to open up and god pissed on me together with the rest of the archipelago. I got soaking wet and it felt like the pikes didn't appreciate the rain either. Only a few small pikes was caught the next two hours before I went back to Dragsö.

A few weeks ago I landed a 106cm pike in a shallow bay which I forgot to update about. Fishing was slow and that fish was actually the only fish that was biting inside the bay that afternoon. More fish around the islands in the middle part of the archipelago that day...

Overall I must say that fishing is better now in general. Results in May was a bit disappointing but June has resulted in much more activity. Hopefully it can continue like that since our annual pike safaris starts next Thursday!

// Daniel Wickman
   2017-06-25

   

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Spring season summary

Summer is here and just like that it also means that spring fishing season is over for this year. Once again it has been some intensive months since our official opening in the middle of March. Seven years ago we had 12 boats to offer for rental but today we have 20. Most weekends this spring the majority of these has been out on the water, except from our reserve boats. Guests has been coming from 12 different nationalities; Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Latvia, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Romania, France, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Italy.

March was overall a good month for fishing, even though it was a cold period. We had our first guests coming for fishing in early March and personally I experienced good numbers and some days good sizes to. When it comes to amounts my best day offered 74 pikes in the boat for three anglers, not bad! As always March is sometimes tricky since night temperatures often reach below freezing point and this cause thin layers of ice in many areas for the first hours in the morning, while the rest of the days normally offer better conditions.

During mid March Camp Dragsö Sportfishing participated in Sportfiskemässan (The biggest Sportfishing fair in Sweden) which this year was held in Jönköping. Almost 15.000 visitors over three days and once again this was a new record for the fair. The interest for sportfishing is growing for every year and I understand why. I mean, how is it possible to not like fishing? :-)

As every year April is a popular month for fishing. Unfortunately, I must say that catch numbers was disappointing overall. Some weekends was of course better than other weekends, and some groups did better than others but that's normal and that's fishing. The positive thing was that I would say that more big fish was caught during April by our guests than what we normally hear about. In the beginning of April several pikes above the +10kgs mark was reported by our guests with the biggest fish pushing the scale down to +12kgs.              

Up until easter in the second week of April, a lot of the pikes was already spawning but then we was hit by a cold front. For a whole week we had night temperatures below the freezing point which forced the pikes to pause their sexy time. Water temperature dropped to be only 5 degrees and unfortunately it took a long time until we reached higher temperatures again. Many pikes seemed to wait for better days and a lot of our guests that arrived during this time suffered of poor fishing.

May is always a very popular month to visit us and this year was no exception. Guests came from all over Europe to visit us for a weekend or week of fishing. Catch amounts got a bit better in the middle of May but didn't reach normal levels for our area. Some groups caught between 30-50 pikes per day and boat during May and of course this is great numbers. It just didn't happen as many times as it normally does.

Actually, the first half of May was very cold. Several days our guests needed to fish during snow and overall low temperatures. Until the third week of May only a few days offered more than 12 degrees in the air. Just like that, temperature switched dramatically to be 20-25 degrees in the air and continued to be like that for a couple weeks. More or less the sky was all blue during this time. No clouds at all and many of our guests during this time left us looking like racoons.

The last weeks of May resulted in quite good amounts of pikes over +100cm for our guests but amounts was once again lower than normal levels. It's difficult to say why fishing has been overall slow last few months, and I think the explanation is far from easy to sum up. But several of the reasons is weather circumstances, an increased fishing pressure both from commercial fishing and sportfish anglers, increased numbers of seal and commorants and much more. Hopefully a more healthy management and better regulations can be added shortly so that we can secure a good pike fishery even in the future. Today there is an absolutely insane harvest from commercial fishermans who each year catch 44 tons of pike only in Karlskrona. This number was approx ten tons only seven years ago. There is much work and important decisions ahead for resposible authorities.

Still more fishing groups will be coming in June so fishing continues even after our official spring season ending. To be back with more reports!

Thank you for reading.

// Daniel Wickman
   2017-06-03

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