Outdoors: Fishing for the Esox slam takes time and luck
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Next up in terms of abundance are northern pike. Northerns are native to Lake Champlain and are found in almost every lake, pond and major river system in the Champlain Valley. They have also been introduced into several waters east of the Green Mountains, including the Connecticut River. Just about any large, flashy lure will catch pike, with a big, red-and-white spoon a time-proven producer.
Pike run much larger than pickerel and have greenish-gray flanks with several rows of yellowish-white, bean-shaped spots. Most anglers don't consider a pike big until it reaches 8 pounds or so, with fish in the teens and above trophies. The state record weighed 30.5 pounds and came from Glen Lake in Fair Haven.
After chain pickerel and pike, the Esox slam starts getting tougher. The diminutive redfin pickerel is the next most common member, but it is hardly abundant. Redfins are found in only a handful of locations in Vermont, primarily the southernmost reaches of Lake Champlain, the lower Poultney River, northern Lake Bomoseen and Pond Brook in Monkton.
Compared with their cousins, redfins are tiny. A 10-incher is big, and anything a foot or longer is huge. But like all members of the pike family, they are aggressive fish and will readily strike a small, size 0 or 1 spinning lure. Although redfins are often misidentified as juvenile pike, they are easily distinguished by their reddish fins, short, rounded snout and the dark, wavy vertical bars on their flanks.
What redfins lack in size is more than made up for by the final member of the pike family: the muskellunge. One of the largest and most challenging freshwater game fish in North America, muskies are the stuff of legends. The state record weighed 38.22 pounds, but there are historic reports of muskies up to 100 pounds and 6 feet long.
Muskies are also the rarest member of the pike family in Vermont, occurring in very low numbers only in the lower Otter Creek and Missisquoi River below Swanton. Catching one is a longshot at best, but that might soon change. In 2008, 250 6-inch muskie fingerlings were stocked in the Missisquoi, followed by 10,000 last year. The goal is to continue stocking a like amount for the next several years, and within a few years the odds of catching a muskie might be better than ever.
Which has my boys excited, especially after landing their first big pike. We were canoe fishing the Otter Creek near Middlebury when Nate apparently snagged the bottom. He pulled back hard in an attempt to free his spoon, and to our delight "the bottom" start heading downstream with the canoe in tow.
Several minutes later, Nate worked the fish alongside the boat. But when I netted it, it slashed and bit its way through the mesh, requiring that we beach the canoe, where Nate and Jake finally wrestled it ashore. It was thick-bodied and longer than the canoe was wide, and I estimated its weight at 13 pounds.
Nate and Jake were impressed. If catching it was merely the equivalent of putting a runner on base for the real slugger to come, they concluded, then they could not wait to hook their first muskie - however long it might take.
Lawrence Pyne can be reached at
