Anchorage Daily News

Armed with barbed poles, anglers spearfished thousands of years ago -- centuries before the idea of using a rod and reel crossed anyone's mind.

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The Book of Job asks, "Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?" Greek historian Polybius, who died in 120 BC, described hunting for swordfish using a harpoon with a barbed and detachable head.

Wasilla's Howard Tieden hasn't read Polybius or, for that matter, the Book of Job lately. But he knows about spearing fish through the ice, particularly in the Mat Su.

For two years now, he's been flying clients out to temporary ice houses with portable heaters on nearly two dozen Mat-Su lakes, cutting big holes and waiting for pike to swim by and meet death delivered from above.

"It was a lot better than we really expected," Tielden said of his fly-in winter pike-spearing business, Arrowhead Charters. "In the huts they don't have to sit out there and freeze their butt off. Kids can go, and there's no limit.

"It's something different, something new."

Last winter was Tieden's first, and he said he had 89 clients. So he's back offering trips in November, December and March this winter.

"Now would be a good time," said Dave Rutz, the Northern Cook Inlet management biologist of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "The ice is only 12 inches thick, which makes cutting holes pretty easy. By January to mid-February, the pike are pretty lethargic."

Tieden sets up temporary ice houses with portable heaters to keeps things toasty. He cuts a big hole, giving anglers a view of the underwater world.

"It's like looking in on an aquarium," he said.

A decoy is dropped into the water. When curious pike approach, anglers try to lure them closer.

"When (the pike) gets to within four or five feet and you're comfortable, you nail it."

The combination of warm environs and the chance to see and strike your prey -- a primal instinct that hunters know better than anglers -- sets spearing apart from the hook-and-line fishing. Typically spearing is more productive too.

Perhaps, at times, too productive.

"With all those folks after a real large pike, a lot of times you take the large fish out," Rutz said. "Large fish serve as a control mechanism" eating smaller pike to survive.

"You can end up with a lake overpopulated with a lot of stunted pike."

But Tilden said his operation isn't hitting any single lake that hard.

"We might catch 20-30 fish out a lake," he said. "We're not putting much of a dent in the population."

PLENTIFUL PIKE

And to judge by the debut last winter of the Mat-Su Pike Derby, plenty of pike are spread throughout the borough. Some derby anglers did quite well.

• Palmer's Bob Witz landed 124 pike.

• Wasilla's Clark Myers took more than 201 feet (total length) of pike.

• Big Lake's Bob Jones hauled in 207 pounds of pike.

• Anchorage's Peter Aftreth and Eagle River's Dan Markgraf tied for the lengthiest pike of 41 inches.

• Wasilla's Jacie Hart pulled up the heaviest at 26.6 pounds.

All together, 300 derby tickets were sold and 900 pike caught -- with winners earning $500 and a hand-carved pike decoy, said Nancy Sult, Houston's chamber of commerce secretary who grew up fishing for pike in Minnesota.

"That's really the (goal) of the whole thing, to get as many as we can. They're eating our salmon," Sult said. "We don't want anyone throwing anything back."

Rutz applauded the derby while cautioning it would make only a small dent in the pike population.

"We're always in favor of removing pike from a lot of water systems," he said. "Though in places like the Susitna River system, you won't remove even a hundredth, or a thousandth, of the number of pike there."

Not that Hart isn't trying to do her part.

Jacie Hart and husband Duane were just rigging up their ice-fishing lines on Alexander Lake near the end of the derby when the flag on a tip-up snapped up, indicating a pike had taken their herring bait. Jacie Hart grabbed the line with cotton-gloved hands and pulled.

LANDING THE BIG ONE

It wouldn't budge.

"I thought it was a little one wrapped around a log," said Jacie. "Or we had the big one."

Duane thought it was a big one. He told Jacie to grab a gaffe.

"I thought, 'What am I supposed to do with this?' " she said.

Then a prehistoric mouth with rows of sharp teeth emerged, nearly filling the circumference of the hole.

Jacie gaffed the big pike -- 26 pounds, 6 ounces -- through the mouth and pulled it from the water.

Just 20 minutes after landing their Super Cub, the Harts had the longest and heaviest fish in the inaugural Mat-Su Pike Derby.

"It was unbelievable," Jacie said.

Just months later, Fish and Game staffers caught and measured about 1,400 pike in Alexander Lake over a two-week test netting period, with several longer than 40 inches.

Alexander Lake and the namesake creek that drains from it into the Susitna River once teemed with salmon and fishermen. Now it supports a population of pike that, like no other place in Alaska, has decimated the salmon fishery and the lodges that depended on those runs.

But eventually, huge pike may get harder to find too, Rutz said.

"Lots of lakes down in the Midwest they've stopped spearing because they're trying to grow the pike back," Rutz said. "The big pike are few and far between these days. You can really fish them down.

MORE PIKE ANGLERS

"Big pike are real aggressive, and they're not smart. The only thing that keep they from attacking lures is that their stomach is full and they're digesting."

Of the thousands of pike netted by Fish and Game at Alexander Lake, only three weighed more than 30 pounds, Rutz said.

Fishing pressure may be one reason why. Just as pike have spread throughout a number of Mat-Su waterways, pike anglers have spread too.

"There's no doubt it's been growing the last 16 years," Rutz said.

Part of that he attributes to the ever-improving technology of snowmachines.

"People can get anywhere they want on snowmachines," he said. "They keep reaching out farther and farther. People will go out 60 miles one way on snowmachines to fish."

Find reporter Mike Campbell online at adn.com/contact/mcampbell or call 257-4329.

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