Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 12 December 2018
Last week Matt Harris came over and Matt, Hansi and I had some excellent days catching a serious amount of well sized pike. We had a hell of a great time fishing together on Rügen!
Matt Harris is a very experienced fly fisherman who has caught many different species of fish with his fly rod. Many trophy fish in between! I think there aren't many great fly fishing places throughout the world, which he didn't fish yet!
Joining us fly fishing for pike on Rügen it's fair to say, that Matt first of all had to learn the details of me catching one pike after another one, while Matt missed most of them. On the last day Matt got all details right and managed to catch a great amount of excellent fish upto over 1 meter in length. Of course Matt as usual did succeed in catching a (first) serious sized pike on fly. He truly is an outstanding fly fisherman working hard to get into the important details fast! It was my pleisure to fish with you guys. Can't wait to share some fishing again!!!
All in all this was an outstanding (2 month) pike season for me. My clients and I landed between 1600 and 1700 pikes! Many big fish were included. For a first time I can't remember the number of pikes over one meter!
Right now my pike season on Rügen island is over and Hansi and I are driving home (Tuesday evening). Of course we are just making very detailed plans how to nail down pike perch (Zander) in this winter.For sure I have worked my way into this fish for some years now. But catching them in the deeper water in winter time is among the toughest games in fly fishing I have come across. That is because 90% of all takes are pretty soft and over in significant less than one second. Due to that most of the takes will never be felt by fly fishermen and thus never get hooked! Anyway I have worked hard to understand the causes and now have several ideas of improvements, which I will test very soon!
Yes, as you may know me "very soon" means starting tomorrow (Wednesday)!
I wish all of you a great week and some fine fishing in your week as well!
All my best
Bernd
P.s.: Since Paul missed some fishing days lately I am (of course) in a leading position in the number of fishing days per year. Besides having been in a hospital for a week in October and some days in February, in which all German waters were frozen, I only missed two more days during the world championships in fly casting in August. If nothing gets into my (fishing) way now I shall hit 350 fishing days this year!
Some pictures as always...