First time on the Zander

When I was travelling back from my trip to Ireland I got to thinking about what was potentially the end of my season. Of course there were the sea lochs and the east coast for Cod but in truth I’m finding it hard to get motivated by these at the moment.

A plan was subsequently put into play to have a crack at Zander with the venue being Rutland Water which has a reasonable head of smallish Zander. Time was not on our side as the season only opens for around 2 months for predator fishing so on Friday night I made the journey south accompanied by Scott. The weather forecast looked favourably on Wednesday but by Friday the whole trip was on the verge of failure. Fog was forecast on Saturday and we could lose valuable daylight hours waiting for it to clear before being allowed to launch. The Sunday forecast was frankly diabolical with 50 mph winds in the script.

After defrosting the car we hit the road only to kick our heels on shore till around 9.30am till it lifted enough for us to launch. Scott had been prowling around with his gear loaded up and rod in hand for most of this time and equally I felt frustrated myself. We then got the nod so off we went.

It’s not small water! It would have been nice to get a handle on where we actually were. Even with a map guide we struggled till Scott fired Google maps up on the iPhone as the fog closed in again.

Having borrowed a fish finder from Callum at Angling Active we easily located some water around 90ft deep with some baitfish marking. At this point there was not much of a drift on so after a couple of moves I had my first Zander! It took a  pearl Illex Nitro Spring on a 30g head.



Confidence was starting to build as we both had a few knocks and as the wind started to build it was time for the drogue. Shortly after this the sounder showed some baitfish and this was soon followed by both Scott and myself hooking up.

The same lure but the stinger hooked this one

My fish was on the deck and Scott thinking his was well hooked went to lift his in. The Zed had different ideas and promptly shook itself from the hook.

An hour or so later the easterly wind was much stronger, the rain constant and both baitfish and Zander had done a bunk. It was tough going even with two drogues slowing us down to get the jigs as vertical as we could. It occurred to us both that the fish Scott has dropped might be a sore one to take. We covered a lot of ground both drifting and slowly covering ground with the sounder on.

Scott then had a change of lure and bingo!

It might be small but when you’ve travelled 300 miles to catch a new species they all count.

The remainder of the afternoon was cold, wet and pretty miserable so 4pm came just at the right time. When we hit the dock we were told that no boats would be allowed out on Sunday. We were both pretty disappointed but understood strong winds even if we had got out would have made it almost impossible to fish effectively. So, mission accomplished and a few ideas to target these fish in the future we headed back for a few pints and some hot food.