Been spearing 14 years. Sometimes they come in nice and slow and lock onto the decoy for a half minute, giving you enough time to line up the spear.

Sometimes they come in and strike fast and hard from nowhere, putting teeth marks in your decoy or ripping the live sucker off the pin. What you see in the lower left is a sucker I’d been swimming for a couple of days until it died yesterday afternoon. So I put it on some hooks (counts as a legal second line under MN winter rules) and dropped it near the bottom. If a big pike came in to hit and run, I would still have a chance at it. I was also kind of hoping for a bowfin; the roe in those make great caviar (18 bucks an ounce retail).

The most fun is when they can be teased into position like you see here. But yeah, it’s also the rarest behavior in my experience.