Interlude - no actual fishing involved.
With flytying, and new patterns, there sure isn't anything better than getting an actual sample. My swedish colleague Sören Essebo kindly mailed me a couple of his flies, ones he uses for pike and seatrout, on the east coast of Sweden. The big one he calls "Vita Gäddsaran" and the smaller one "One size fits all", meaning that he uses the smaller one when there is a chance to catch both seatrout (seagoing brown trout), seagoing rainbows (escapees from fishfarms) and pike.
Usually he catches pike.
The fly is unusual in that it uses a very small hook (#6 - #2, but usually
the #6 and #4), and is made only of ostrich herl, with a bit of flash. They are very
light, and with a light wire leader he casts these particular ones on a 5wt rod.
Nothing fancy; budget equipment. Usually he wades, and fishes with a floating line, but
during summer he uses a sinker from the boat more often, as the pike go deeper
then and won't rise as readily.
He has a really cool fishing diary, though with one exception it is all in Swedish. Here is the exception (scroll down), and here is his description on how to tie his fly and wire leader.
I'm toying with the idea of using one of these in my perch combo rig, as we'll have things like steelhead prowling around the coast here soon. One of these should be light to cast, along with a perch fly or two. Of course, once I get my float tube, it might be a good striper fly at San Luis too.