Expert Fishing Tackle Reviews & Advice
There’s a specific kind of heartbreak in pike fishing that has nothing to do with missed takes: you finally connect with a proper fish, get it thrashing at the net, and then notice your trace has coiled itself into a tight, useless spiral. Choosing between a titanium wire trace and a steel wire trace for … Read more
Lose a lure to a pike once and you’ll never fish without a proper trace again. Wire traces for pike exist for one blunt reason: a pike’s teeth will saw straight through mono or braid in seconds, and what’s left behind is either a lost lure or, worse, a fish swimming off with a hook … Read more
Ask ten pike anglers how to rig soft plastics for pike and you’ll get eleven opinions, half a dozen contradictions, and at least one story about the “one that got off because the jig head was too light.” That’s not because soft plastic rigging is complicated — it genuinely isn’t — it’s because most anglers … Read more
There’s a particular kind of silence right before a pike hits a shad. The rod tip’s doing nothing, the retrieve is lazy, and then the water just… opens. Soft plastic lures for pike are the reason so many UK anglers have quietly binned their box of hard jerkbaits and gone all-in on rubber. They’re cheap … Read more
Stand on any pike-fishing forum for more than five minutes and someone will be mid-argument about jerkbait vs swimbait for pike, usually with the quiet certainty of someone who’s never actually lost a fifteen-pound fish to a badly chosen lure. The truth is less dramatic and more useful: both catch pike, brilliantly, in different conditions, … Read more
There’s a particular kind of silence that falls over a boat or bankside swim right after a jerkbait dies on its pause — that half-second where the lure hangs suspended, wobbling gently, and you genuinely don’t know whether the next twitch will be met with open water or a headshake the size of your forearm. … Read more
Right, let’s settle this properly. A spinnerbait is a safety-pin-shaped wire lure with a lead head, skirt, and one or more spinning blades riding above the hook on a separate arm, built to plough through snags almost untouched. An inline spinner, by contrast, threads the blade directly onto the main shaft in front of the … Read more
There’s a particular sound every pike angler learns to love: the faint whirr-click of a blade cutting water on the retrieve, right before the rod tip buries itself into something toothy and furious. That’s the whole appeal of the best spinnerbaits for pike in a nutshell — they’re loud, they’re proud, and they get bitten. … Read more
Standing on a gravelly bend with the current shoving against your waders, you quickly learn that lake tactics don’t transfer to moving water. A blade that spins beautifully in a still pond can go dead and lifeless the second it hits river flow, and a lure that’s too light just gets swept past every pocket … Read more
There’s a particular kind of silence on a British lake in January — no birdsong, no rising fish, just mist sitting on flat, cold water — that makes a lot of anglers assume the pike have simply switched off. They haven’t. What is genuinely true is that pike become cold-blooded in the most literal sense: … Read more