There is a point every autumn, usually somewhere in the second half of September, where pike fishing stops being hard work and starts being the best it has been all year. I cannot give you a date because it is not a date, it is a water temperature. But you feel it happen. One week you are grinding out a follow or two, the next week the same swim gives you three runs before ten in the morning.
What has changed is that the water has dropped a few degrees and the pike have gone from tolerating summer to actively feeding for winter. Everything I do from September onwards is built around that.
Why the fish move
Through summer the pike in most waters sit close to the weed and the fry, in the upper layers, and they feed in short opportunistic bursts. They are not desperate. As soon as the water cools, two things happen at once. The weed starts to die back, which strips a lot of the cover they were using, and the prey fish shoal up tighter and drop deeper.
Pike follow the prey. That sounds obvious but it changes where you should be casting. In September I stop fishing the weedbeds and start fishing the edges of them, and by the middle of October I am fishing the drop-offs, the deeper holes, and anywhere the bottom changes shape. Find where the roach and skimmers have gone and the pike will not be far off.
The switch from lures to deadbaits
I lure fish hard through the summer because it lets me cover water and find fish. From late September I start putting deadbaits out instead, and by November I rarely bother with a lure at all on the big waters.
The reason is not that lures stop working. It is that a cooling pike will take an easy meal that costs it nothing, and a static deadbait on the bottom is the easiest meal in the lake. A pike that will not chase a lure across a swim will happily pick up a half mackerel lying in the silt.
My standard autumn setup is two rods, one on a legered deadbait fished hard on the bottom, one on a float-fished bait presented just off bottom. If one gets picked up twice and the other does not, I switch both to whatever is working and stop guessing.
Baits that earn their place
Sea deadbaits do the heavy lifting for me in autumn. Mackerel is my first choice because it is oily, it holds together on the cast, and a half bait is about the right mouthful. Smelt is worth carrying because it smells like nothing else and sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Herring is softer and casts less well, but on a short chuck into a marginal drop-off it is excellent.
Coarse deadbaits matter too, particularly on waters where the pike have grown up eating roach and bream rather than anything from the sea. A dead roach fished on a low-lying trace, injected with a little oil, has caught me more autumn twenties than any single sea bait. If you use coarse deadbaits, they must come from the water you are fishing or from a shop, never moved between waters.
Timing your sessions
Autumn is the one time of year I will happily fish a short session and expect a fish. Pike feed in windows, and in September and October those windows are often first light and again in the last hour before dark. As the clocks change and the light goes early, that late window gets more reliable, not less.
If I only had four hours, I would take the afternoon into dusk over the morning every time from October onwards. The water has had all day to warm slightly, the light is dropping, and the prey fish move.
Handling gets more important, not less
Autumn brings bigger fish, and bigger fish need better handling. Unhooking mat down, forceps ready before you cast, wire trace every single time, and a proper set of long-nosed pliers. If you are new to pike, go with someone who knows what they are doing before you go alone. Getting a treble out of a big fish is a skill and the fish pays for you learning it badly.
Barbless or crushed barbs make the whole job quicker and I have never felt I lost fish because of it.
What I would do this weekend
Pick a water you know. Find the deepest accessible water within range, or the sharpest drop-off you can reach. Put one bait tight to the feature and one bait twenty yards off it. Fish from mid-afternoon until you cannot see your floats. If nothing has happened by then, move the baits ten yards on the next trip rather than changing everything at once.
Rob Hadley grew up fishing the rivers and drains of the Norfolk Broads, and it was inevitable that pike would become his species of choice. He’s been targeting predators seriously for over 20 years – starting on dead baits, moving through live bait rigs, and eventually landing on lure fishing as his preferred method about eight years ago.
These days he fishes the Broads through winter, travels to Chew Valley Lake each spring for its outsized fish, and spends the warmer months working soft plastics on rivers across the East Midlands for perch and zander. He’s had pike to 31lb and perch to 3lb 9oz, and reckons both records are beatable on the right day with the right set-up.
At The River Bend, Rob writes the predator species guides, lure fishing technique articles, and most of the winter fishing content.
Covers: Pike, perch, zander, lure fishing, winter fishing, predator rigs