I have been setting the hook too early for thirty years and nobody ever bothered to tell me to my face. It took a frozen boat ramp, a hangover, and a seventy year old man named Herb who calls every fish “son of a bitch” whether it got away or not.
The Ramp at First Light
Last fall I hit the river for end of season northerns, which is my own personal religion and has been since I was fourteen. Late November water, the pike gone shallow and mean after their spawn, flopping around in the dying weeds like green logs with attitudes. I got to the ramp before sunup with my bass habits and my bass reflexes, which is where every bit of my trouble started, and sat in the truck warming my hands around a coffee that had gone stone cold on the drive over because I am an optimist about thermoses.
Herb was already there, which meant I was technically late to a spot I picked. He had his boat backed in and his old dog Skeeter sitting up on the bow like a carved gargoyle with a liver condition. He watched me back my trailer in crooked, which I did because I was trying to look like I knew what I was doing instead of actually doing it.
“You after pike?” he asked without turning around.
“Since before you got out of bed.”
“Then you forgot something,” he said, and walked over and took my coffee off the gunnel and dumped it in the river and handed me the empty cup back. “You drink that, your hands shake. You got shaky hands, you’ll rip the face off every fish you touch today. You want to fight a pike or pet one?”
Three Fish I Don’t Deserve
Here is the thing I did not know about myself until that day, and the thing nobody tells you until you have lost enough fish to make it hurt. I set the hook on a northern pike the same way I set the hook on a largemouth, and a pike is not a largemouth, and that sentence is the entire reason I have lost more giant fish than most men will ever see.
The first hit came at nine in the morning. A bucktail spinner over a dying weedbed, and WHAM, a fish north of fifteen pounds inhaled it and I cracked that rod like I was trying to start a motorcycle. The pike shot out of the water once, all green and yellow with a hook hanging out of the corner of its jaw, and spit the lure straight back at my face. I let out a sound that was half word and half air and Herb, from forty yards away, did not even look up. He just yelled “Wait.”
Wait. The man told me to wait while the fish was still in the air. I was already mad about it.
Second fish, twenty minutes later, same weedline. Boated my line through and a pike thumped it and this time I actually thought I had a plan. I counted in my head like a patient man, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and then I drove the hook home and the fish bulldogged me for maybe eight feet and opened its mouth and threw the treble like it had never been stuck at all. Hook set looked clean. The fish just did not care. Pike have a mouth like a tackle box full of sewing needles and the soft bits are about as big as a silver dollar. You hit the soft bit, you hook him. You hit the needle forest, you get to watch a forty inch fish swim away laughing at you.
What Herb Meant
Herb idled over after the second one and killed his motor and let the boat drift into mine. Skeeter wheezed at me like a disappointed relative.
“You’re counting to two,” Herb said. “A pike don’t need two. A pike needs you to let him run. He takes your bait and he runs with it a ways and then he stops and turns it and swallows it head first. You set the hook before he swallows, and you are pulling a loose bait out of a full mouth and calling it a hobby.”
“I let it run,” I lied.
“You let it run about as long as it takes a sneeze.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it and pointed the wet end at me. “You ever notice how the old guys catch all the big ones and don’t seem to be trying? It’s because they’re not trying. They’re waiting. Every big pike I ever caught came in the four seconds I did absolutely nothing correctly.”
He was right and I hated it. I have spent thirty years of my life treating every strike like a fire alarm, yanking and ripping and setting the hook the instant I felt weight, because somewhere along the line I got it in my head that a fish that feels the hook is a fish that got away, and that the only cure was to set it faster. It is the same reason I interrupt people and drive ten over and eat my food too fast. Patience was never a muscle I bothered to build. I thought speed was the same thing as skill.
The Fourth Fish
The third fish, I am not proud of, so I will skip it. The fourth one is the one that taught me, and it was the smallest pike on the whole river and it mattered more than any of them.
Near dusk, the weeds went still and the water turned to glass and my bucktail swung past a downed tree with a pike sitting under it like a parked Buick. The fish took it, and took it, and this time I did the hardest thing I have ever done with a rod in my hand: I did nothing. I let the line go slack. I counted to two, and then I counted past two, and the line jumped. The pike had stopped, and turned, and I felt the whole weight of it through the rod as it started to swallow.
Then I set the hook, and the hook stayed in, and for the first time that day a fish stayed on the other end of my line instead of turning into a memory. It was maybe a twenty six incher, nothing to mount, a fish Herb would have called a “little shit” and released without a thought. But it was the first pike I ever caught on purpose, and not by accident, and not by brute force smashing a hookset through a fish’s face like I was trying to drive a nail.
Herb motored over as I lipped him and took a look at the hook hanging clean in the corner of that jaw, right in the one soft spot, and he nodded once and said “Now you’re fishing.” And then he dumped the last of my coffee out of a cup I didn’t know he’d stolen and handed it back empty again, because some lessons you have to be reminded of twice.
The pike went back in the river and I went home and thought about the thousand fish I had probably yanked out of that soft spot too early in my life. Maybe not a thousand. But more than I want to count, and every one of them is a reason I learned to hold still. Hunting has taught me the same thing in the woods. The big ones don’t go to the guy who runs fastest. They go to the guy who waits the four extra seconds that feel like forever.