Bloody Pike

Maybe its just me but i have seen ALOT of pictures on the site lately with bloody pike. Personally i have been icefishing for for pike for the past 6 years and have caught well over a couple hundred pike. I have maybe gut hooked one or two. Im prolly not doing anything different than the average joe as well considering i just use a trebel hook. My question is are there that many people that are seriously gut hooking a majority of the pike they catch? Are they all like waiting 5 minutes after the flag goes up to go catch the fish? Some of the pictures people post on here make me sick. There is no way half of the pike in these "bloody" pics are surviving. Im sure many of you have seen the same.

A lot of people are just straight up bad a handling, holding, and unhooking fish. I personally don't even fish for pike anymore because i got sick of larger fish getting hurt even when I was being careful. One time i had a boga grip on a 36" fish on big muskego so I could keep it in the water while i unhooked it, and the thing rolled over and it's belly was so heavy that it snapped it's own jaw. I've seen a lot of guys destroy pike gills because they didnt know how to hold them properly, even saw a guy grab one by the eyes a few years ago and then release it!

Can't even count the amount of times when I see somene else's tip up go off and they come stumbling out of there shack and have to finish there beer first. By the time they get to the tip up the hook is swallowed down to its butt.

I feel your pain. New fisherman should be allowed the chance to learn though. It happens even to the best fisherman... My suggestion is to use bigger hooks in areas with a size limit.

Maybe they are keeping them. When I keep pike I bleed them out right away then they taste better.

I've caught more than just a few pike with a couple gill plates detached at one end. In the cold water of winter, they are all readily releasable, as long as they have not been out of the water too long. It's been 3 winters since we had to intentionally release a pike with steel still in it - we have learned that the few gut-hooked fish we get every winter can be un-hooked using the through-the-gill method.

I caught one in the upper 30s two winters ago that was hooked with a #4 octopus-style single hook at the base of the gills just in front of the gut opening. It stopped bleeding after I removed the hook. I inspected it's gills and saw no damage so I released it. That fish had a distictive disfigured left pectoral fin. I caught and released it again last summer on a buzz bait in the same weedbed that I caught it in the previous winter so the bleeding apparently didn't kill it. Sometimes luck doesn't go your way and you get one gill hooked. When that happens and they're bleeding like a stuck pig, they become dinner. No sense in feeding the crayfish.

It doesn't take much to make a fish bleed, even if handled carefully. However, that being said, I agree that many of the pictures posted show pike with an excessive amount of blood that is more than likely due to letting the fish swallow the bait deeply and then digging it out without proper tools or technique.

You don't have to gill-hook a pike to make them bleed; if you have truly caught a few hundred pike, I'm surprised you haven't noticed that by now. Those bleeding pike are in far more danger of damage from freezing sensitive areas (fins and eyes) than they are from blood loss.

Try circle hooks, especially when the lakes have size limits approaching 40". PLEASE