Overview
RF4 staff members dive into the game and share their knowledge with the players. This guide was written by moderator Crucian with the intent to show players how to catch Pike on Kuori Lake.
Introduction
Ok, so this time I am going to do things a little differently. Instead of giving a man a fish and handing you my information on what I narrowed down to be my best bets for trying to catch bigger and trophy pike, I am going to try and walk you through my thought process. I will still at the end give you a guide, I just want to try and give you the ideas on how to collect your own information so you can use the guide just as a starting point and tailor your fishing to what you find to work the best for you. How did I find the data? How did I summarize the data etc. Obviously first and foremost RF4 is a simulator and extremely realistic but also at the end of the day it’s a game. Another thing is that walking yourself through finding out what works, why, and where will give you insight into fish on your particular instance and you will be able to find them when they move.
Where to Start
Ok so here is the list of questions I asked myself. Most will be pretty obvious. What are some general facts about pike? How do pike feed? Where and at what times do pike feed? What are pike spawning patterns? Since this will be a lure fishing guide, do pike prefer certain colors? If so, under what conditions? What type of lures are the most successful? Those are my basic questions. So off we go to Google. I personally am not the hugest fan of Wikipedia. Lots of others use it including other mods and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I personally am not too fond of how anyone can edit it. Yes it is true that you pretty much have to take data from the internet with a grain of salt, but I try to get my data from fishing sites maintained by government organizations, fishing magazines or from actual guides for real life fishing.
General Pike Data and Feeding Activity
Pike are carnivorous ambush predators and consume large amounts of fish daily, but have also been known to eat frogs and even waterfowl. They will eat just about anything smaller than them. They are able to lie perfectly still for long periods of time. Their maximum speed is between 8-10 miles per hour. They are found mostly in weed beds facing the open water. The small pike tend to be in the thickest area of the weeds. Medium sized pike will be right on the edge where they can speed out and surprise their prey. This is why the pike are shaped the way they are, and their torpedo like body helps to propel them through the water with extreme speed bursts so they can be on top of their target before they have a chance to escape. The really big pike including those of trophy size tend to be at the points leading into weedy bays.
Where to Find Pike
I found a couple different trains of thought as far as where the fish would be during different times of day. The first claimed that morning pike would be in open or shallow water. Towards the afternoon hours the pike would be found in weed beds or in deeper waters especially in higher temperatures. Ok let’s stop here a second. This is a guide for Kuori. What is the first thing you notice when you hit Kuori? Weeds. Perfect right? Right. Given the amount of lures and techniques in game, I chose to focus solely on the weeds. There just wouldn’t be time to fish everything everywhere which is why I am choosing to do this report in this way. We continue on. Higher temperatures also tend to decrease pike activity. Once the sun goes down, They usually can be found in she same manner as early morning. The optimal time for monster pike is early a.m. as pike are less known to feed at night, which makes for a hungrier and more aggressive fish in the morning.
Pike Spawn Activity
Pike start spawning when the water temperatures are about 5 degrees celsius or above normally May 15th to 31st. They spawn in daylight hours in areas with heavy vegetation in dark water bays near creek inlets where available. Females are much larger and usually pair with one or two males. The males swim alongside the females so the eggs come out while males fertilize them. When in shallow water the fish backs are easily seen and the water disturbance noticeable. The fertilization occurs in last years vegetation where the eggs are able to sit in the water above the bottom and obtain the required amount of oxygen. The eggs hatch in about 14 days. When spawning is actually taking place fish are difficult to catch as they are distracted. However, the pre and post spawn have highly active feeding times. During this period pike are extremely aggressive. Medium to small size lures work the best for catching fish.
Lure Coloration
Most fishermen follow similar rules when it comes to colors. For pike metallic finishes were supposed to be the best for clear water. In stained water, the classic red with white, and yellow with red work well. Orange, firetiger (green, black, orange) also work well. Bright sun favored flashier spoons such as metallic blue, silver, and green or mirrored silver backs. In overcast conditions colors such as black and purple with a white pearl back or dark blue with a white pearl back work well. Basically bright lures for bright conditions and high contrast lures for low light conditions.
Lure Techniques
Pike will hit almost anything that moves. The following lures can be very effective for pike fishing.
- In line spinners retrieved steadily just fast enough to keep them off the bottom.
- Spoons steadily and slowly reeled just fast enough to keep the spoon wobbling. If this doesn’t produce try a flutter retrieve, doing a jigging type motion with the reel. Spoons are most effective along drop offs.
- Minnow-imitating plugs can also be fished with a steady retrieve. If that doesn’t produce fish a stop and start method can be effective. As waters warm up, use cranks or soft plastic swimbait running in the 3 meter range.
- Regular spinners drawn past sprouting weeds with a three count just as the bait approaches possible hideouts. Add a twist tail or rubber worm trailer for action and color contrast.
- Jig and worms in temperatures of about 30. Pike are found mostly along 6 to 10 foot drop offs. Use a full 2 to 3 foot hops.
- Surface plugs lured over weed beds in the calm water of the morning or late afternoon. Slim minnow shapes work well.
Information Collection
The way I did my research was done mostly the same way I fish. I would start with one type lure and vary my retrieval a bit until something worked. If I couldn’t get something to work after three attempts, I changed lures. After a few lures not working, I switched to a different rig. It was quite productive. I may have had some areas of inactivity, but the for the most part I was able to reel in pike after pike. I recorded lures and results. If I didn’t get a bite I noted that, but also tried to take note of the fact that the particular lure may not be working due to weather conditions, temperature, color, time.
Basically you are trying to fit pieces into a puzzle, find them all, and come out with a complete picture. Of course the picture won’t cause you to reel in trophies back to back. You may have a tough time getting a trophy at all. The points in the rigs that you are using will also color that outcome. The picture will however increase your bite rate, and usually bring consistently larger catches. Oddly enough, I just used the effective lures guide I located sparingly. If you know me, you know I have a love affair with pike and fish them often, so I had a pretty good idea to start off with and I also wanted to test pretty much as many lures and rigs as possible. Of course whether or not I would continue to fish them would be affected directly by my results with that particular lure and rig.
Lure Color Counts
If we take a look at our color chart to see how what lure colors were preferred in game, we see that lures with silver in them came in at the top, closely followed by green.
The following graph shows the weight of fish by lure type. The number of spoon catches jumps out at you immediately. Wobblers did quite well too though, and if you look at the weight to catch number ratio, you can see that pound for pound, wobblers still held their own. The numbers here are also not absolute. The technique that I used of switching rigs when fish stopped biting could have easily led to much more spoon fishing.
Weather
Next we take a quick look at weights during weather. We can quickly note that sunny days held a wealth of fish. Are the numbers skewed due to weather being sunny more of my fishing time? They certainly might be. Trying to fish the same amount of hours in different weather conditions would require some serious weather condition monitoring. Could it be done? No reason why not, but it didn’t happen this go around. These reports are a work in progress and of course we will see better ways to accomplish more complete results each time we do one.
Time of Day
Last but not least, we have a look at time of day. True to the information that we found during research, morning to midday and evening to night seem to be the time to fish.
First conclusion
Ok so we take a final look at our information and see if we can come up with a ballpark idea of how to attack getting our bigger fish and hopefully net our trophy. We can deduce that silver and green might be our best colors. The bigger fish seemed to come during sunny weather, but partly cloudy had potential as well. Spoons and wobblers brought the biggest fish without a doubt, but even though I only caught one fish on the pipe, we do see it lands in the over 5kg category. Last but not least we look at our time frames. We did catch an over five in all brackets, but morning to midday and evening to night brought bigger and more abundant fish. The absolute biggest pike while testing weighed in at 9.967, so it was a close one. The fish was landed at 17:41 on a sunny day with a temperature of 12 degrees using the following lure with a fast paced stop and go reeling speed of 35.
Setups
For a setup I went in heavy. I wanted to be able to handle a pike quickly and easily. Also some of the other fish there can get very big, so I wanted to be able to handle them just in case although I did expect to get mostly pike except for the occasional perch and that is exactly what happened. I saw a few Lake Trout, and very few Arctic Char.
Spots
I fished from five spots. I left the screenshots full size so you can see the coordinates. Just click the picture to expand the. The first one is actually the view from the dock, just in the boat so it was clearer to see the cast area. In all cases I cast right along the weeds. The dock edged out every other spot, and all the others were pretty even for the most part. I had periods of non activity, but I had those everywhere including the dock.
Validation and Conclusion
Armed with our deductions I headed back out on a trophy hunt. Unfortunately I was unable to net one, but hopefully you will be more successful than I was. The next two fish under the top out of 9.967 were a 7.813 which was caught on the first lure pictured reeled with a stop and go of 35 in Sunny weather at a temperature of 6.6 degrees at 5:55, and a 6.651 caught on the second lure pictured twitched at a speed of 25 on a Sunny day of 7.8 degrees at 11:23.
I hope this guide has put you guys on the right track for catching those big pike on Kuori. Have a lot of fun fishing and If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask me on the forums!~
Greetings and tight lines from Crucian340