I wasn't about to suffer a further blank when I made my mind up about fishing plans for the coming week, I was going to take a different tack and target species I'd not considered all year long, namely the apex predators, pike and Zander.
I'd had an interesting conversation with a fellow angler passer-by at Stratford last trip there and he'd supplied me a tasty little morsel of information that I hope might well, and in the fullness of time, lead to a fun way to lure fish my way to the pike point in a little fished local free venue apparently packed solid with the species. However my immediate target was to be the Zander of the local cuts, the Coventry and the Oxford Canals around the Longford And Hawkesbury areas, all water within easy walking distance of home and most familiar to me as I see it almost every single day of my life.
It tends to take three or four cracks at most of the species on the challenge list before you'll achieve it. Sometimes you'll do it first time, especially if you have prior knowledge of exactly where and how to catch lots of one given species, but more often than not it requires some considerable groundwork and homework before you'll figure out the best methods, baits and approach that will take the catch weight over the bar.
With Zander I think that there's work to do on a number of details before anyone one of us four fishing challenge 'contestants', will get there. Firstly there is the appalling hookup and hookhold rate commonly experienced in zander fishing. No-one, not even acknowledged experts, seems to have a clear answer as to why they should be so terribly hard to hold on to, if indeed you ever hook up to one in the first place. It's quite literally, hit and miss.
An example that springs to mind is the mind bending session I experienced in October of last year when I banked three fish, lost three more, one a big heavy fish, and had no less than twelve pickups that were struck and missed completely. If I'd been able to land even half of those fish then I'd have surpassed the mark I'm aiming at now, but as it went, I only managed to land a total weight of just eight pounds for the three fish.
I'm sure you'll see clearly just why attaining a total weight of twenty one pounds of the fish in the one session is difficult when you see the maths ~
Two eleven pounders, or...
Three eight pounders, or...
Four six pounders, or...
Five five pounders, or...
Six four pounders, or...
Seven and half three pounders, and so on.
Now, I don't know anyone who has ever had seven zander of any weight in the one session let alone seven and a half of them over three pounds! The average weight on the canal for the fish is probably two pounds or so, and you are going to need a shed load of them at that weight to get anywhere near the target.
Undeterred, I thought it worth the try, not that I thought there was any chance of half-success, but just to see what the playing field smelled like from grass roots level, and, because I had gone without my usual day session at the weekend for the sake of marital harmony, I'd managed to wangle myself a whole weekday session, from high noon till nightfall, and beyond, in which to experiment...
First Peg near Tusses Bridge (and tackle shop)
It was my considered opinion that it was the hook pattern itself that was the root cause of the majority of the failed hook ups - that, and the way that the bait was mounted upon it. I felt that I needed to plunder the pantry of past experience and the only fish that I have enough experience of that has a similar mouth to a zander is a bass (it's much closer to that of a perch actually) and bass are very hard to hook if you are using the wrong hook pattern, so much so that I would say that only two bites of every ten currently experienced by British sea anglers with baited hook that originates from a bass actually will put a bass on their dinner plate.
The answer with bass is to use circle hooks, not aberdeens and the like. The hook up rate with these weird looking contraptions is so phenomenal that I won't even go bass fishing without them dangling from my snood...
Only problem, even though I was fairly certain that circle hooks would work brilliantly with Zander too, was that I was clean out of them. I did however have some Mustad Ultimate Bass hooks in 3/0 and 4/0 sizes so I rigged a couple of those up to some wire and these were to be my hook traces for the day. These are big hooks admittedly, but I thought that hooking the small bait lightly through the root of the tail or the lip would give a sort of hair rig effect.
An old picture of the canal at Hawkesbury Power Station (long since demolished) that I stumbled across in a museum, taken from roughly the same position near Tusses Bridge as the one above
Bait was sections of small rudd and perch deadbaits that I'd gathered with some difficulty from Parkers Pool a few days earlier. These were mounted as delicately as possible with the hook point as exposed as possible to hopefully gain that reliable hook up rate so crucial to any chance of success.
The first peg near Tusses failed to produce anything even though it looked zander territory with its dark shadows. An hour later I moved up to a spot under the old power station footbridge that has produced reliably in the past and sure enough, there were zander in residence. Within half an hour I had two on the bank at just under two pounds and just under one pound weight, respectively. So, I'm off the mark now with two pickups, two hook ups - hopefully due to the hook pattern, no dropped fish and a small but welcome early start of just under three pounds. The large size of the hooks was clearly a non-issue.
These two fish were kept for the pot as I wanted to firstly, try out a fish that is reputed to be very good indeed, and secondly, if they were as good as reputed, have a ready food supply on my doorstep that I could harvest from time to time, as and when a dish of fish is required, in much that same way as I used to do with bass.
The spot produced no more bites and nor did a couple of other likely looking areas that I explored along the way back to home. I nipped in to the house and prepared the two fish for freshness sake just an hour after knocking them on the head. Neither fish had a recognisable thing in their stomachs, the largest turned out to be a female with not quite developed roe who was refrigerated for the family evening meal, but I could not resist filleting and cooking the smallest there and then ...
Well, the good news is that zander is bloody excellent. Much, much better than you'd ever imagine a fish out of a murky canal could ever be. No wonder that British Waterways culls them and flogs them off to Billingsgate. Here's a picture of a zander anglers lunch - the fillets of the one pounder sautéed in butter and olive oil along with garlic, wild parasol mushrooms gathered from Longford Park (I know what I'm doing) and chives from the garden. Oh, and a glass of chilled beer to round it off, of course! Restaurant quality fare, for free...
Apres Lunch, to follow...
I'd had an interesting conversation with a fellow angler passer-by at Stratford last trip there and he'd supplied me a tasty little morsel of information that I hope might well, and in the fullness of time, lead to a fun way to lure fish my way to the pike point in a little fished local free venue apparently packed solid with the species. However my immediate target was to be the Zander of the local cuts, the Coventry and the Oxford Canals around the Longford And Hawkesbury areas, all water within easy walking distance of home and most familiar to me as I see it almost every single day of my life.
It tends to take three or four cracks at most of the species on the challenge list before you'll achieve it. Sometimes you'll do it first time, especially if you have prior knowledge of exactly where and how to catch lots of one given species, but more often than not it requires some considerable groundwork and homework before you'll figure out the best methods, baits and approach that will take the catch weight over the bar.
With Zander I think that there's work to do on a number of details before anyone one of us four fishing challenge 'contestants', will get there. Firstly there is the appalling hookup and hookhold rate commonly experienced in zander fishing. No-one, not even acknowledged experts, seems to have a clear answer as to why they should be so terribly hard to hold on to, if indeed you ever hook up to one in the first place. It's quite literally, hit and miss.
An example that springs to mind is the mind bending session I experienced in October of last year when I banked three fish, lost three more, one a big heavy fish, and had no less than twelve pickups that were struck and missed completely. If I'd been able to land even half of those fish then I'd have surpassed the mark I'm aiming at now, but as it went, I only managed to land a total weight of just eight pounds for the three fish.
I'm sure you'll see clearly just why attaining a total weight of twenty one pounds of the fish in the one session is difficult when you see the maths ~
Two eleven pounders, or...
Three eight pounders, or...
Four six pounders, or...
Five five pounders, or...
Six four pounders, or...
Seven and half three pounders, and so on.
Now, I don't know anyone who has ever had seven zander of any weight in the one session let alone seven and a half of them over three pounds! The average weight on the canal for the fish is probably two pounds or so, and you are going to need a shed load of them at that weight to get anywhere near the target.
Undeterred, I thought it worth the try, not that I thought there was any chance of half-success, but just to see what the playing field smelled like from grass roots level, and, because I had gone without my usual day session at the weekend for the sake of marital harmony, I'd managed to wangle myself a whole weekday session, from high noon till nightfall, and beyond, in which to experiment...
First Peg near Tusses Bridge (and tackle shop)
It was my considered opinion that it was the hook pattern itself that was the root cause of the majority of the failed hook ups - that, and the way that the bait was mounted upon it. I felt that I needed to plunder the pantry of past experience and the only fish that I have enough experience of that has a similar mouth to a zander is a bass (it's much closer to that of a perch actually) and bass are very hard to hook if you are using the wrong hook pattern, so much so that I would say that only two bites of every ten currently experienced by British sea anglers with baited hook that originates from a bass actually will put a bass on their dinner plate.
The answer with bass is to use circle hooks, not aberdeens and the like. The hook up rate with these weird looking contraptions is so phenomenal that I won't even go bass fishing without them dangling from my snood...
Only problem, even though I was fairly certain that circle hooks would work brilliantly with Zander too, was that I was clean out of them. I did however have some Mustad Ultimate Bass hooks in 3/0 and 4/0 sizes so I rigged a couple of those up to some wire and these were to be my hook traces for the day. These are big hooks admittedly, but I thought that hooking the small bait lightly through the root of the tail or the lip would give a sort of hair rig effect.
An old picture of the canal at Hawkesbury Power Station (long since demolished) that I stumbled across in a museum, taken from roughly the same position near Tusses Bridge as the one above
Bait was sections of small rudd and perch deadbaits that I'd gathered with some difficulty from Parkers Pool a few days earlier. These were mounted as delicately as possible with the hook point as exposed as possible to hopefully gain that reliable hook up rate so crucial to any chance of success.
The first peg near Tusses failed to produce anything even though it looked zander territory with its dark shadows. An hour later I moved up to a spot under the old power station footbridge that has produced reliably in the past and sure enough, there were zander in residence. Within half an hour I had two on the bank at just under two pounds and just under one pound weight, respectively. So, I'm off the mark now with two pickups, two hook ups - hopefully due to the hook pattern, no dropped fish and a small but welcome early start of just under three pounds. The large size of the hooks was clearly a non-issue.
These two fish were kept for the pot as I wanted to firstly, try out a fish that is reputed to be very good indeed, and secondly, if they were as good as reputed, have a ready food supply on my doorstep that I could harvest from time to time, as and when a dish of fish is required, in much that same way as I used to do with bass.
The spot produced no more bites and nor did a couple of other likely looking areas that I explored along the way back to home. I nipped in to the house and prepared the two fish for freshness sake just an hour after knocking them on the head. Neither fish had a recognisable thing in their stomachs, the largest turned out to be a female with not quite developed roe who was refrigerated for the family evening meal, but I could not resist filleting and cooking the smallest there and then ...
Well, the good news is that zander is bloody excellent. Much, much better than you'd ever imagine a fish out of a murky canal could ever be. No wonder that British Waterways culls them and flogs them off to Billingsgate. Here's a picture of a zander anglers lunch - the fillets of the one pounder sautéed in butter and olive oil along with garlic, wild parasol mushrooms gathered from Longford Park (I know what I'm doing) and chives from the garden. Oh, and a glass of chilled beer to round it off, of course! Restaurant quality fare, for free...
Apres Lunch, to follow...
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