How do river pike position differently from lake pike?

River pike are current-refuge specialists: a long, flexible ambush body is superb at lunging but expensive to hold against flow, so pike stack wherever moving water goes soft — backwaters, sloughs, eddies behind points and wing dams, inside bends, the seams below islands, and any weedy slackwater connected to the main channel. The current does the concentrating for you: prey washes along the seams, and the pike waits on the soft side of the line. In spring, river pike also run far up tributaries and into flooded backwaters to spawn, so a marsh that is bone-dry in August may be the river's pike factory in April.

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