Out fishing on Wednesday, reeling in the feeder rod to check the bait, when something suddenly seemed to grab the end tackle. I had landed a small pike a short while before and assumed another had grabbed my feeder as it came past his nose.
No problems landing this, but it was not the expected pike. I had caught up someone's old line. A couple of yards or so of 10 pound nylon attached to a nice chrome swivel. Only part of the swivel was visible though, because clamped around it was the shell of a medium sized swan mussel. Alive, alive-o.
At the business end of the tackle was a bream of about four pounds with a bright red boilie hanging just outside its mouth. Initial thoughts were pity for an angler who had been so useless that a four pound bream broke him on ten pound line.
But all was not as it seemed. The swivel was attached to a wire trace, with a Jardine two-treble snap tackle at the other end. One of the trebles was firmly in the bream's lips, sealing them together, both lips having been hooked. The "boilie" was not a boilie, but a red rubber sphere, but looking very much like a 12mm boilie. It was attached to one of the trebles with a few inches of light mono. All had been held down by a 4oz sliding pear lead.
It seems that the was originally a deadbait rig, with a rubber flotation boilie ball designed to give the bait some pop up buoyancy. I assume all then became snagged on the bottom, and at some stage along came a bream, and ate what it too thought was a food parcel. Bream obviously can feed purely from visuals sometimes.
The trebles were rusting, and around the hook points the bream's mouth had developed quite large lumpy blisters. So I suspect the fish had been in this state for some time. Otherwise it looked healthy and swam off strongly, and I hope gratefully, when released. It may still be some time before it can again feed though.
In this day and age though, I was surprised to see that some anglers still use snap tackle with all the hooks barbed. It is so much easier and safer with semi barbless hooks these days. Far less pike are liable to be damaged with these modern hooks. So, if you are piking, and use trebles, please go for semi barbless hooks.

good write up jay-z.. totally agree with the semi barbless trebles.. even better would be to use the newish single hook methods for piking...safer all round..

I don't do much reading on piking rigs, (or any other rigs) so didn't know there were any newish published single hook rigs. But single hooks were a conclusion I reached by myself quite some time ago, having done a number of experiments when I started piking seriously about 18 months ago.

Hence the "if ... you use trebles" in the post.

yeah i noticed that... wasnt dismissing what you said.. i was agreeing totally..there hasnt been any new rigs invented that i know of, but a lot of pike anglers are moving on to the single hook methods.. particularly the "tagging" method... sort of hair rigging technique