On an early June morning, myself along with my two life long best friends (Ryan and Jax) woke up not knowing exactly what kind of fishing we wanted to do. After making some coffee and waking ourselves up, we knew that it wasn’t going to be a trout day. With the weather in the mid 80s, and virtually no cloud cover, we knew that it was a warm water species kind of day. However, Jax and I had been on a virtually non-stop carp week so we didn’t want to do that. Our one result – how about pike?

I had fly-fished at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal before for pike and had not had too much luck, but the weather looked good, we had the flies, and we thought why not. So we loaded up the Jeep, drove to the arsenal, and started our day extremely early.

My buddy Ryan decided to throw a spinning rod off of the shore for the day while Jax and I decided to go to the east end of the lake and start wading and blind casting. On my third cast, BOOM. A monster hit almost tearing the rod out of my hands because I was not expecting it, and a 31 inch northern pike was landed. Pretty unbelievable catch – we had been fishing our huge yellow and red bunny streamers parallel to the bank, but this guy was caught about 30 feet off the bank in a deeper section.

Once afternoon hit and the sun was up, I tied on one of my go to saltwater flies: the gummy master. This minnow impersonating fly looked excellent in the clear flats, and it was the only fly that the spooky pike would eat when the sun was up. 5 pike were caught on this.

At the end of the day, seven northerns were landed and the day was well spent.