Convergence, Luck and a Northern Pike

It’s easy to overthink things in the outdoors. Recently while popping the string off my recurve, I heard a light noise behind me. There I was pack on, bow sans string in hand as a nice black bear nonchalantly strolled down the trail ten yards behind me. Practically a gimme shot if there ever was one. If only I had been two minutes slower, if I’d stopped to retie a bootlace or rest the legs I would have seen it coming while in a bit of cover, and most importantly had a strung bow in hand. When it comes to hunting and fishing it’s hard to discount luck as a determining factor in the day’s events.

A big pike for our little lake and it's hard to discount luck playing a part.

Pike were hard to come by this year on my annual trip to Ontario. Smallmouth bass, including some decent ones were slow but still came in. The panfish were large, eager and delicious, but the northerns, they had a case of lockjaw. Try as we might fly rod and gear, it wasn’t happening, could they be another victim of a changing lake, warming water, shifting bottom structure and seasonal highs and lows, or am I just overthinking things?

First evening with the fishing boat in, two minutes or less into a troll on our family’s traditional route and boom. Rod tip down, Shad Rap done it again. There isn’t a lot of showiness in a pike’s fight, just a down and dirty brawl till it spits, breaks off or hits the net. In this case it hit the net, not a monster for the species, but the biggest one to come out of our little lake in a lot of decades. And hot damn was it fun.

For the rest of the trip any time I concentrated on pike I not only wondered where they were, were there any left? The longer the pikelessness dragged on, the more the thought of convergence and luck rolled through my head. While there was a reason we were trolling the edge of a deep channel close to a weededge in the evening hours, what were the odds my lure would pass within striking distance of that pike?

I’d have to guess the odds where better to be a few inches, feet or yards out of that fish’s strike zone. Or what about the fact that the lure converged in space and time, at an exact point that a nice, hungry pike, ready to bite was in the same spot too. It’s hard to ignore that no matter how good we are in our outdoor pursuits, shithouse luck plays a role. Some days the best we can do is put in time and wait for luck to rear its head.

See you on the water or the mountain.

-Matthew Mallory