Flying for pike

Cryder, 16, already an adept fly fisherman, was determined to try his hand at something his friends did routinely with regular spinning tackle — fishing for northern pike.

After his friend moved out of a deep hole to fish another spot, Cryder moved in.

"I stepped into this spot he was in and cast out this big pike fly I'd tied the night before," he said. "It was just big and black, probably 6 inches long." Cryder cast the heavy fly once, and just as he was starting to strip in the line, a noise upriver caught his attention.

"I don't know if I heard something or what, but when I went back to pick up the fly again and started stripping it back in, there was a huge pike on the line," he said. "It was a very big pike." A few minutes into a 15-minute battle to land the giant fish, Cryder caught a glimpse of it.

"All I saw was the tail and the back fin, and there was about 9 inches between them," Cryder said. "I knew right then it was a huge pike." Huge doesn't really describe the behemoth, though.

"He ended up being 41 inches long and we estimate about 22 pounds," Cryder said.

For all intents and purposes, that's about as big a game fish as you can catch in western Montana waters.

Pike, a predatory game fish not native to Montana waters, are considered problematic, as they feed heavily on other popular game fish, including trout.

Fishing for pike is nothing new. In fact, anglers in western Montana have been chasing the toothy fish for years.

"My dad got me into pike fishing years ago," Taylor Scott, a lifelong Montanan who works at Kingfisher Flyshop in Missoula, said.

Scott has seen all sizes of pike in area rivers, but said that Cryder's 41-inch monster is indeed a marker.

"That's a good size pike no matter where you go in America," Scott said.

The fact that Cryder landed the fish on his own fly with an eight-weight fly rod makes his fish story all the more intriguing.

Marc Umile, a family friend, believes Cryder is unsurpassed when it comes to his teenaged fly-tying ability.

"I'm a guy that's been fly-fishing since my early teens," Umile said. "I've never seen a teenager that has his abilities as a fly-tier. He's already mastered the art, and I've never seen anybody do that under 30." Cryder started tying flies when he was 9 years old when his father, Christian Cryder, taught him some basics.

"You can get better-quality flies and they'll last longer," Malachi said of tying his own patterns.

Besides, Cryder prefers to improvise his flies because commercial flies often lack one essential element or another.

When he started fishing for pike with large trout streamers, he quickly realized they weren't big enough to emulate what pike can eat.

"Pike can eat fish up to 10 or 12 inches long," Cryder said. "My biggest streamers were 1½ or 2 inches long." So Cryder did what he often does when faced with a problem: He mulled it over in his mind, trying to figure out what would most look like a meal a large pike would go for.

"I had to come up with a way to tie my bodies so that they still had mobility and didn't look stiff," he said. "I started tying these basically segmented flies with two hooks and 20-pound mono to connect them." With the body figured out, Cryder created the rest on the go.

"I basically make them up as I go along," he said. "Whatever I feel like I need to add, I add. I always have flash and I'll always add red for the gills." The largest of his pike flies are half-fish, half-mouse creatures.

They're certainly ugly, as is the casting technique, which is done properly by slinging the huge fly backward until you feel the weight of it tug at your rod and then pulling it forward until it shoots out in front of you and plops down above or below the water you want to strip it through.

There is nothing delicate about fly presentation when you are fly-fishing for pike.

"They go more for commotion," Scott said. "They're not technically hitting stuff because they're hungry, it's more because they're pissed off." When Cryder rode his bicycle home with his trophy pike in tow, his mom, Marylin Cryder, called his dad. "You need to come home and see what your son just did," came the message.

"I was floored that something that big was living in the Clark Fork," Christian Cryder said later. "In all honesty, I knew there were pike in the Clark Fork, and I was kind of like, ‘more power to you,' but I never expected him to catch something like that." Catching big fish has been a lifelong pursuit for Malachi Cryder, even though he's only 16 years into the effort.

But catching pike offers something a little different and perhaps more motivating for him.

"Yeah, the reason I started trying to catch pike is I found out that they were in this river," he said. "The Clark Fork is where I like to fish, and it's already hurting in terms of trout populations." For Cryder, it seemed the best thing to do was to come up with innovative flies to catch the biggest and most predatory fish in the river as a way to preserve his beloved trout fishing.

"I figured if I take out a pike I'm going to at least help out the trout population a little bit, maybe not in a large way but enough to make a difference over several years," he said.

Some contend that pike don't eat trout, just whitefish - but others, Cryder included, think there is no way pike can get that big without gobbling up a few hundred trout every few months.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks electroshock surveys find pike in the 10- to 12-pound range sporadically through the Clark Fork River, and there is no telling how many came downstream after Milltown Dam was breached in March.

Kids likely will continue to catch pike on regular spinning gear, but Malachi hopes his big fish story spurs hard-core fly fishers to tie on a big, ugly fly and go in search of the biggest pike in the river.

"I think, as an older guy, he's doing us all a huge service," Umile said. "We need to encourage what he's doing." Timothy Alex Akimoff writes for the Missoulian.