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Zed is for Zander, an introduction

Don Corleone

Autumn nights are my favourite time of year when it comes to going after zander. Some of my best bags have come in the brief few weeks before the clocks go back, when there's just enough time to skip work at the stroke of five, drive to the river like Michael Schumacher and get your baits in the water before it gets dark.

I'm no hardened zed head, prepared to camp out for nights on end and freeze my nuts off in the hope of a double. I fish for them for fun, a little light relief if you like, before the winter closes in and the serious business of piking gets under way.

Pick a mid-week night and the chances are you'll have the water to yourself. It helps to have a bit of elbow room.

My favourite style of fishing for them is trotting, working the features until I find the shoal. While it lends itself to a mobile approach, I generally fish short sessions of three or four hours.

Rather than spend all night chasing them, I tend to make an educated guess at where they're likely to be and give a trottable stretch of river a thorough work-out.

Features are the key. But our spiny friends are far more nomadic than your average pike and have a different MO. Zander are a shoal fish that hunts mob-handed.

Once the light levels drop, they're on their toes on the hunt for food, so you need to think prey fish.

Areas of river frequented by the maggot drowners will often have ready-made roach takeaways concentrated just over the first drop-off. Popular swims get heavily baited every other day, and the zander soon wise up to the fact. Dinner for thirty..? No problem.

Bridges, shelves, inlets, moored boats are all worth a shot. The key is keeping the bait on the move, exploring the water, until you find them.

On one river that winds through a busy city centre, one of the best scams was trotting through the reflections of he streetlights. The rings of bright water attracted the prey and silhouetted them to any passing zander like searchlights.

Back to the trotting. Once the boats stop and the ducks disappear to do whatever ducks do overnight, you can trot a long way with a little thought.

Unlike the current light tackle vogue, I like crisp rods, which are light enough to hold, coupled with a nice thin floating braid like 30lb Whiplash.

The business end is usually a couple of size eight barbless trebles, or a treble topped with a double. Wire-wise Caliber Wonderwire in the 15lb takes some beating. It's more like cotton than wire, which helps when they're feeling fussy.

Floats are a nifty home-made design designed to accommodate a Starlite. Just araldite the tubing onto a thick peacock waggler left over from your tenching days, slide a bait popper or small polyball onto it and you should find it'll support a bait and three or four swan shot nipped on the trace to give you some ballast weight to mend the line to and keep the bait at the required depth.

Bait is almost invariable a small coarse dead, hooked upside down. Zander frequently grab the bait by the tail, for some bizarre reason. So sticking the top hook through both lips and the bottom treble near the tail seems to hit home more often than the usual top hook through the tail root, bottom hook in the flank arrangement.

It also helps keep the bait on and stop them smashing it off the hooks when they're having a barney over it.

Smaller zander are shoal fish. They whack into the prey, then go back and pick off the walking wounded injured in the first attack. That could explain why a two or three inch dead, trotted close to the bottom often scores.

So you're trotting the river, watching the little light, paying off line from the reel. While some takes just smash the float under, a lot more will do the opposite.

If the float bobs, lifts and dithers all over the shop, often in lightning quick darts, the chances are there's a shoal there. You'll frequently get two or three of them fighting over the bait and a quick strike will lead either to a missed take or a foul-hooked zed.

Wait until the float either moves away across the surface, or goes under and the line tightens. That means one of them's got a hold of the bait and is legging it away from its mates to enjoy it's meal in peace - that's when to hit them.

Before we get too into non-instant striking, a word of warning: Every water that holds zander holds pike. Fishing small baits, there's a real risk of deep hooking any passing jack that takes fancy to it. They do feed after dark as well. So if it just goes down a hole in the river hit it straight away.

It's better to miss the odd zander - which you will anyway - than risk deep hooking a pike.

If a trot fails to produce, try varying the depth. Dragging the bait along the bottom sometimes works, as does twitching back a few yards to lift it in the water and allow it to flutter back down again. If the bait fish are up near the surface, you'll sometimes catch them fishing two feet deep.

Work the swim whatever you do. Zander search the river, rather than waiting for their prey to come to them, so keep trying the margins, under the bank, down the middle, tight to the far side, until you find them.

You'll sometimes find you'll miss a couple of takes, or maybe even catch one, and the river will just go dead. Again, that's the time to start exploring the swim and try to work out where they're heading next.

If all else fails, walk 30 yards up or down the bank and try there.

I won't pretend for a moment that this is the best approach to adopt if you want a bigger zed.

But several years of messing about on the river after work have convinced me it's the most reliable way of finding a few schoolies with the chance of the occasional bigger fish.

Anyone who wants to know more about zander would be well advised to read Steve Younger's excellent book Fenland Zander. There's a lot of wisdom and experience crammed into its pages.