Spear Fishing for Pike in Alaska - Northern Pike Catch and Cook! Swimming in cold and murky water!

Pretty long. You like it or you don't like it? I think it's time to go. I think this is the longest my beard's ever been. There you go. Yeah, what do you think, huh? Looking better? Should I keep the beard or should we do something different? That was a pretty solid goatee, yeah? Yeah. You like it? You like that? Does that look good? Yeah, you look handsome with it. Yeah, you think I should keep this forever? Keep it, keep it. What do you think, babe? You like it? Nathan, do I have an excellent moustache? So, Becca, do you like it or do you love it? Is that your favorite one so far? I do. Okay. Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and I'm in Alaska. I'm going spearfishing. Well, 2021 is a weird year and to make it even weirder, I've gotten into spearfishing. I really love doing it but I don't live by the ocean. So, whenever I'm traveling, I try to see if I can't get a chance to go do some spearfishing. That's kind of what I'm doing this year. So, when I got unexpectedly stuck in Alaska for a couple weeks, I decided to see if I couldn't go spearfishing and I want to do exactly that. I'm going spearfishing for Northern Pike. All right, I think this is where I'm supposed to meet up with everyone. All right, guys. We've got a group here that's meeting up to do some spearfishing in freshwater for Northern Pike. So, I've never been with these guys. Just kind of met up by chance. So, I'm going to just see if I can keep up with everybody and not embarrass myself. Well, before we head off, I got to change into my wetsuit and I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to pull that off but I'm not going to film it. So, it wasn't easy but I got it done. Yeah, it's nice when you're wearing stretchy camo pants in public when you got a group of people to do it with you, you know. Look at that. That is sexy. All right, we're just carpooling over to the lake and we're gonna go see what this is like. Remember kids, don't go to a second location with someone you met online. Nothing like sitting in the rain in Alaska, taking your shirt off. It's like full body spanks. You got to spray yourself down with some sort of like conditioner or shampoo or, you know, baby shampoo. Otherwise, it sticks against your skin and you tear your wetsuit. So, I actually just bought a brand new three prong but because I wasn't planning on doing this, I didn't bring it. So, I now own two brand new three prongs. You know, I got into spearfishing just so I could wear a knife on my leg. You ready to do this? Let's do it, man. We got quite a group of people here. All right, guys, we're going after northern pike and I know a lot of people consider northern pike a valued trophy fish and they are. They're an absolute wonderful fish to catch but they are very invasive in this part of Alaska. They've been illegally introduced and they cause a lot of damage to the trout and salmon and native populations and the populations just absolutely explode in these lakes. And because there's nothing that preys on them, the populations explode, they wipe out the native fish, then the pike populations collapse and you have both bad salmon fishing and bad northern pike fishing. And the fish we catch are going to get donated to the native hospital in Anchorage. People from the bush who end up flying to the hospital for treatment often really miss having wild food. They live off of wild meats, their traditional diets, and so people who have wild meat can donate it to the hospital to help prepare traditional meals that the people are used to. And it's a nice thing to do for people that are having a rough time in the hospital. So that's what we're going to be doing with the meat here. But I've never been to this particular lake but there are a lot of lakes here in this part of Alaska that are absolutely crawling with invasive pike. I've been on some lakes where we catch 80-something pike in one day. The problem is because they have no predators, they end up just multiplying and multiplying until they start to wipe each other out and they get all stunted and you end up catching, you know, a hundred fish in one day but they're all kind of tiny and runty. So coming in here and thinning them out a little bit, it's not only good for the native fish but it's also good for the pike fishermen because it keeps those pike from ending up being super small if you can thin them out a little bit. I'm going fishing for a fish I've never speared before in a place I've never speared before, with gear I've never used before, with people I've never met before. This is a day of firsts. All right guys, here we are. We're gonna try this out. We're breaking up into pairs and each of the canoes are kind of picking a little cove and we're gonna go along and see if we can't poke a pike. So this is my first time diving in fresh water and it was a bit of a murky experience. You can see that the visibility was only a couple feet here. It's in really shallow water and we ended up having to go right up into the shore to be able to see the bottom. So I think I'm only in a foot and a half, two feet of water right here and the camera is mounted on the top of my goggles so that when my eyes are underwater sometimes the camera's kind of half in half out of water. But we ended up just kind of swimming along the shore looking for pike. So it took me about 30 minutes or so to see my first pike. I was swimming a little to the side and behind Drew and he must have scared a pike because it starts to swim and I barely get a glimpse of it through the murk and you can see it just barely on the camera here. And I got trying to get my spear up and I'm turning my head and it's gone. You know it just moved a few inches away and you couldn't see it anymore in the in the murk. So and that was what it was kind of like for the first little bit. You just you would see these little shadows coming in and out as you were scaring pike away but you just briefly see them and wouldn't have time to get your spear up. But it was really cool. We're in margins here and we're going under lily pads and in weed beds and crawling over logs and just kind of hoping to find a pike hidden away under a log or under a lily pad or something like that. Even though the visibility was garbage we saw a lot of cool stuff. I found these big old freshwater clams and saw a bunch of freshwater lice and shrimp and one guy got a leech on his face so that's kind of neat. But right here I saw another pike and I tried to chase him a little bit to get a better shot at him and he disappeared into these weeds. Well that was an interesting experience. The visibility is only like a foot or two and uh but it's it's actually really comfortable this seven mil wetsuit. I'm actually quite toasty but uh we spent about an hour kicking around and I only saw two pike. Both of them were moving and not like stationary so they just kind of I could see them just kind of come around me and by the time I got my spear up yeah it was it was too late. It was way cool. Saw a lot of clams and little weird little bugs and freshwater shrimp and stuff. It's hard like there's two that it's kind of like just too late because they're right in front of your face. All right so word on the street is even the guys that have done this a few times uh had a rough go of it. The visibility's a bit worse than normal so that makes me feel a little better you know. We'll see if anyone else got any. There's a lot of spears in the water today. Okay we're back at where we launched the boats waiting for everyone else to group and we just saw a little pike jump so you know we're doing this. So a guy I was diving with named Andrew loaned me his dive light and it made a huge difference. I can kind of see the pike reflecting gold in the light and there was about four pike in this little cove that I saw and one of them I actually got to spear. Unfortunately my GoPro battery died and I didn't get it on camera. Okay I have no idea how much my head cam was recording because it died right out there but we just saw one jump and went in there and just try to check it around. Saw four really quick using a dive light and I tagged one that came off the spear and then these guys found him just hanging out on the surface so so maybe I got an assist. There you go that's a really that's pretty typical size pike around here I imagine right? They got tons of teeth on them they'll chew your fingers up so bad. Oh yeah look at those tiny little chompers. Oh it's like a brillo pad in there. You woke him up. Alex you get those yours? Oh sweet look at that. Well there we go guys that was some rough visibility but that was loads of fun. So in the end I think only three fish got tagged but uh you know it was a good time but I need to clean up my fish and get that gutted before I run out of life. All right guys I'm back at the house and we're gonna cook up one of those pike. We were gonna donate them but because we shot so few of them uh we decided not to waste the hospital's time and uh we're just gonna cook them up so I've got one of them and I'm gonna cook it up and I'm gonna try some funky recipes because we are leaving on a plane tonight and I didn't have time to go out and do a bunch of shopping and fancy cooking so we're gonna do kind of a what do we have in the cupboard sort of cooking thing and I got some fun ideas. If you think that freshwater fish sometimes tastes a little bit muddy add buttermilk or vinegar to the meat and let it sit for just anywhere from 40 minutes to a few hours and just let it marinate in that just a little bit and it really cuts out that muddy flavor. I don't know if this pike's gonna taste that way but I've got a little bit of a mango vinaigrette here and we're gonna we're gonna season the meat a little bit before we start prepping the fish just to do that. Yeah would you like to eat some pike? All right so pike is infamous for having lots of little bones and see these these are y bones you see how they they're shaped like a y that's that's why they call them y bones but they're really easy to take out of the meat after it's cooked. Just marinate a little bit of vinegar fried a little oil seasoned with a little bit of garlic salt nothing fancy. Pike have really tiny little scales too so if you fry them in oil it the skin tastes really good and the scales kind of just add this nice little crunch like potato chips. The skin and scales is actually the best part. If you want to see a fancier recipe for cooking pike I did a catch and cook pike video about a year ago I put a link down in the video description to that. Well hopefully you guys enjoyed this short little pike fishing video and uh I just had a great time it was kind of this random opportunity to go spearfishing for pike popped up and I'm like yeah I gotta do that so had a great time but thanks for watching hope you had a great day and don't forget to click subscribe put out new videos every Saturday morning. 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