A Few Words On Cohabitation: Dinner Is Served!

Two smiles in one picture!

One fine summer day on the Canadian Shield, my fishing partner and I were resting comfortably in our cabin, whist we let the July heat, sunshine, and bluebird sky pass into the late afternoon hours and on into evening. Dog days are long and sometimes hot on The Shield.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door…

(Knock! Knock! Knock! Add dramatic music for affect… dum duh dah!)

Now keep in mind that the cabin I am talking about is roughly an hour away from the nearest neighboring camp – by boat. It is another thirty-minutes from the neighboring camp to the next small town by car. And when I say small, I mean if you blink, you’ll miss it. The next “big” city (“big” meaning more than six people, twelve dogs, sixteen cats, a plough horse, and a medic – if you’re lucky) is two hours from the small town. But on the plus side, it always has a vacancy at the hotel.

Spanky Joe's Monster!

Some folks have been known to take a float plane to this Xanadu, but that’s a long and bumpy ride just to come and visit us.

So, with that in mind, my fishing partner and I looked at one another with bewilderment, as we jumped out of our respective bunks and made our way to the door.

Could it be the lodge owner? Nah! He left for the US border yesterday and said he wouldn’t return to Canada for a few days – even a week.

Maybe it was a curious camp neighbor hoping to pick our brains and pry us for information about this Esox treasure trove somewhere in Northwestern Ontario?

…And don’t think I’m gonna spill the beans about which lake either – it’s a secret. Well, for now it is…

Big Pike by Bobzilla

Maybe it was Publisher’s Clearinghouse at our door come to tell us we won a million bucks?

No such luck!

“Gasp! Oh [expletive] it’s…!”

We opened the door to a guy who has been a nemesis of sorts, a constant source of angst, and at times a real pain in the keester. To be fair he did help us out of a jam a few years back, when our boat broke down and we needed a tow. But we have to keep reminding ourselves about that in order to keep it civil, because he goes above-and-beyond the call when it comes to pesky.

Oh, get this, he stood on our doorstep, which was a rickety old broken-down wooden splinter factory surrounded by a thousand square miles of wilderness, wearing a pirate shirt. You read that right, a pirate shirt. Think The Pirates of Penzance and you’ll get the picture. It was puffy and had a dazzling array of colors blended into a silky stitch suitable for swashbuckling, but certainly not fishing.

Jack Sparrow had boarded our vessel and was now performing pirouettes around the cabin. Nice! Who dresses like that in the middle of a forest?

Well, let me tell you…

He immediately launched into an accusatory diatribe aimed at my partner. Ahab insisted that the one-hundred-and-five muskies my bud recorded the previous year (that he won all sorts of awards for), were faked. “Lies!” Like we made it all up to win a few accolades in a fishing club.

See what I mean about his being pestiferous?

We could have made all those fish up, but we didn’t. And being told we did got my partner’s blood pressure up to a fever pitch pretty quick. But me, being the usual bridge over troubled water that I am, couldn’t wait to inform the pirate how far behind in the fish-catching department he was already, as we had boated a few lunkers before he’d even dropped anchor… uh… I mean, got to camp.

One evening we were all just sitting around over a few cold brews chewing the fat, when Captain Hook let out with a peculiar observation. He claimed that the Esox in this lake (said: muskies and pike) didn’t eat the smallmouth bass. He said they “cohabit” and that was the final word on it.

Hmmm? Really?

Sunset Country Pike.

We were drifting a weed bed just the day before when a 50-incher decided to cohabit with about a five-pound smallie.

“You want fries with that?!”

He started talking about one spot in particular, I’ll call it the Milk Bottle Motel (MBM) for our purposes here – to protect the innocent.

This is a great spot!

To begin with, MBM is a long rock reef that sticks-out from the mainland like a big finger. There’s deep water around the point, which gradually slopes into the abyss from the fifty yard long shallow rock bar that stands out of the water in a few places, creating several very nice saddle areas with down timber and coon tail weeds.

Like I said, there’s deep water almost all the way around, but on the back side the bottom comes up and forms a huge weed/rock combo flat that continues into a spring spawning bay, with a sand bottom, big logs and stumps, and cabbage weeds.

Doesn’t that sound inviting?

Truth be told, MBM had been a regular daylight stop from day one. We’d go there and toss rattle baits, tiny surface lures, and small bass spinners for smallmouth bass and little “hammer handle” pike just to pass the time away. But we never looked at MBM as a big Esox haunt.

Why not?

Well, it was because of this guy, the pirate, who had convinced some of our friends way in the beginning when they first started coming to the lake that this was not a place to see big fish. He told them about the whole cohabit thing and ran them off a really good spot.

We were new at the game and fell for the mythology of Esox ourselves for a while – more about that later – hook, line, and sinker. Newbie is, as newbie does, and we were green.

One day I got to thinking about it. We had been catching bait-size fish all afternoon and one of our buddies even boated a nice pike. I took a long cast from the point straight out to deep water and had what I thought could be a 50-inch class fish follow my inline spinner all the way to the boat.

Cohabit my Aunt Fannie!

I decided to come back later. And with that same bait, an hour before sunset, in a foot of water out in front of the reef facing deep water, I had a 52-inch muskie cohabit with my smallmouth bass color spinner. An hour after dark we came back again and my partner bagged a mid-forties pike on the back side of the reef.

Since then, we have taken a vast number of Esox trying to cohabit with the food… uh… I mean, other species. We like to fish for the food too though, so it all evens out.

What’s troubling is all the mythology that goes into this sport. And the other thing that really gets to me is how we all fall for it.

My group was handed some line (pardon the expression) about fish all dancing around MBM fin-in-fin singing Kum Ba Ya and not one of us thought to stop at the spot to see what was cookin’ during prime feeding time. Not until… well… you know.

MBM is an all you can eat buffet with 50-inch class fish dining there regularly. Like it, or not, pirate boy, you gave-up a pretty good spot, once we figured it out.

MBM has all the right stuff: rocks, weeds, wood, and access to deep water. It has a steep drop on one side and a weed flat that gradually falls-off on the other. And wind always whips across this place – one way or the other. No matter what time of day, there’s activity on the point. There are waterfowl, bald eagles, and you’ll never-ever go away empty-handed.

I recall a photo I saw maybe a decade ago of two pike (I think they were both pike?) and one had made a gallant attempt to swallow the other. The head-first attack was cold and swift, but there was one small problem. The fish doing the attacking was about 45-inches. The fish it tried to eat was roughly 38-inches.

Can you imagine what happened? Dinner got stuck. The smaller pike became lodged in the jaw of the pike that tried to eat it and both fish died just like that – together forever, like ebony and… oh, never mind!

Cohabitation. Right!

I guess the point of all this is to not get you swindled by the assumptions of others. Especially if those assumptions are done with the intent to put you off of a great spot. What Blackbeard never realized is that by the time he’d paid us that visit in the woods, we had him all figured out. And he wasn’t about to chase us away from MBM again.

Look for the signs. Find structure. And for goodness sake, if you should see fish the size of the lures in your tackle box forming a conga line around all of that structure, think “big fish spot” not cohabitation.

Keep your eyes open for conditions that energize the food chain. Ah, now there’s a term I can hang my hat on! Wind across a rocky point and/or weedy flat almost always spells b-u-f-f-e-t.

Food in the area?

Dinner is served! Argh!!

(Reporting for Esox Hunt Magazine. January 2012.)