Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - The Quest for a Cut Double

I have all but abandoned the idea that the canal can provide me, or anyone else for that matter, with the twenty one and a bit pounds of zander in the one session that it will take to gain the elusive challenge point for the species if that session is not to be a 48 hour long stay assault ~ a pleasant holiday after carp or barbel on some tranquil pond or babbling brook, perhaps ~ but a self-inflicted torture upon a busy canal, believe me...

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - The Sticks After Dark

Lee, author of This Angling Life came over to my manor last Friday evening for a pint at the Greyhound and then walk of a mile to some prime zander territory that I have had earmarked for some time but just haven't got round to fish because of its horrendous daytime boat traffic, very narrow towpath and the fact that it's just too remote for comfortable solo sessions in the pitch black when the fishing there would be at its easiest.

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - A Herculean Task

For zander, the wooded stretch of the Oxford Canal outside the Elephant and Castle pub up by Tusses Bridge looks the part all right; in shade for most of the day and lined with boats but I got no bites there last time out and none this time either. I'm starting to rethink what is zander water and what is not as we've been fed the line down the years that zander like the dark more than the light but I actually think that zander like the murk between, the very conditions which give them the slight edge over the prey that they feed upon.

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Percentages

Last week's zander rig experiment on the Coventry and Oxford Canals produced encouraging but unreliable data. I had five pickups resulting in four banked fish and one missed on the strike. That's 80% hook and hold, which is very good but is a figure that cannot be trusted as there's simply not enough data there to draw conclusions from, is there?

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - The Widget Rig

This is the rig I have been developing for my own zander fishing on the Coventry Canal over the past year or so.

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Apres Lunch

Setting back out again just after devouring a specimen of the very species I was targeting felt at once most satisfying and somehow familiar, as if I had made fundamental contact with the hunter gatherer roots of the very 'sport' I like to indulge myself in. It was odd to make such a repast not some time after close of play, but between times. I was more than half way back toward my antediluvian self by the time I arrived back upon the towpath...

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Pre-Lunch

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.

Canal Zander- Lucioperca Problematica - Operation Zed! Night 3

After my mad evening last week pulling my teeth out over the impossible zander up the cut, I had all kinds of subtle (and crude) ideas about how best to tackle this 'funny peculiar' fish. I'd missed half of the runs completely, hooked five fish and only landed three, and that's not very good, is it?

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Operation Zed! Night 2

I noticed in the afternoon that the starlights on the floats from the night before were still glowing enough to enable another zander trip into the night, so I got my gear together and was up the cut by three. My plan was to fish a float rod for roach and put out a sleeper rod for the zeds, then move back to the basin just up from home and fish by the moored boats and into the night for zander.

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Operation Zed! Night 1

Keith came over to my stretch of the Coventry Canal the other night for a spot of Zander hunting and I joined him. He's after a five pounder for his fishing competition and despite landing 13 from the Avon thus far has not got over this apparently difficult hurdle, as yet.

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - More Zeds from the canal

Of course, after catching that little zed on a worm, I had to return to the same spot just to see if it was actually a hotspot full of fish. I had some small roach in the freezer that I'd bought a month before for a planned future trip out

Canal Zander - Lucioperca Problematica - Zzzzzz.......

I'm not sleeping, though the roach seem to be...

I went out for short session on the canal and ended up, after a succession of rapid swim changes, from one wrong spot to another, at a spot that looked somehow, brooding