The predator from the East
June 13, 2025
Unmissable autumn
September 15, 2025
Dynamic pikeperch
Text and photographs by Marco Altamura
Spinning, after nearly sixty years of experience in the field, is still able to amaze me!
Every year I dedicate the month of June to the search for pikeperch with the jigging technique in the waters of our beloved pre-alpine lakes; well this year I made catches with an anomalous technique, unusual for the fish in question. Let me explain: in almost all cases, this predator native to Eastern European countries implements its windows of predatory activity in the immediate vicinity of the seabed, in contact with its roughness.
The fishing action therefore consists of jousting our silicone shad by making them transit with slow movements through all the structures (natural and otherwise) that conform the benthic substrate. The up-and-down movement of the snares triggers the aggressiveness of the percid that attacks without hesitation. In this early summer 2025 however, practicing classic jigging as well as the technique dictates, I had no success so much as to lead me to think that there were no predators in the area; coincidentally, and I would like to emphasize this adverb, during a quick shad retrieval from a spot deemed unsuitable, I felt a decisive bite in the rod so much as to make me think it was a pike or a torpedo.
Great was the surprise to find that at the other end of the line was a beautiful pikeperch that had attacked the fast-moving lure! From casual to making it a habit was a moment and so I did not hesitate to deliberately retrieve my lures rather quickly, racking up a series of catches among which the most significant was a 3.280-pound sandra whose photos appear as an attachment to this report.
In an ever-changing world, even fish change character traits in their behavior, and the skill of us casters is to adapt quickly to these new situations.
There remain some cornerstones concerning this type of spinning: 2.40-meter rod to be matched with a size 4000 reel loaded with a very good 0.15-mm-thick super braided wire of fluorescent yellow color, theAsso 8XPE Perfect Storm And the fluorine terminal Asso Premium 0.30 mm thick.
The former guarantees excellent resistance to abrasion, a very important feature in this discipline where the artificial scours all the meanders of the seabed, together with the possibility of tracing the trajectories of the artificial even in complete darkness thanks to the particular coloration; the latter, in addition to its absolute invisibility in the water, is appreciated for its qualities of resistance even to the wet knot in the case of fights with large fish.
Materials consistently proved their worth even under particularly trying conditions.