Just one fish.

All the local canals seem to really be waking up a bit now after a sputtering spring thing. I think it was three weeks ago that I saw the first little fish dappling the surface on the Grand Union. The zander might have spawned and now seem firmly on the feed and the catch rates are reflecting this. Perch though are another matter! A couple of outings ago I caught one solitary perch which was ready to pop, it was that full of spawn. Since then though the temps have risen so much that I was sure as hell the perch population should have got their mating done with.

One canal that I have neglected a bit lately is the Coventry as the general lack of a hard winter season did not benefit it at all. Usually when we get a good consistent winter the Coventry responds well and fishes consistently. In previous years when the temps have been up and down I have found that the fishing can be very patchy, even on normally reliable areas. Hence I have purposely been reluctant to fish there.

The warmer weather got me thinking that maybe it might have settled down and that the perch might be feeling a little peckish should they have spawned. It was a bit of a sputtering start for me on the day after an early wakeup call from my boy resulted in me turning off the alarm to glim a little more kip. In the end though I did get there and did fish, although the fish seemed hard to find or should I say, hard to convince to eat.

I was very diligent about working along the stretch, methodically using several different lures in various ways all whilst fishing a small dead bait as a sleeper rod at the bottom of the marginal shelf to hopefully appeal to a zander. But even working very hard it quickly became clear that the canal was still not on form.

My one sole bit of action was as pure as pure can be. From a short distance away I saw what I was sure was tiny roach flipping out in a flat calm section of canal hidden from the wind. As I approached, two more small silver fish jumped out of the water. After quickly flicking through the lures I had to hand, I settled on a small silver glittery paddle tail grub which I cast tight to the far bank cover beyond the jumping fish. I must have cast and recast twenty times before the lure got hit on the fall as it dropped into the trench. It turned out to be a big perch which had taken my grub and what a fatty it was as well.

You could put a saddle on that!

One perfect hit from a perfect perch. I would love to say that I walked away and went home satisfied with my perfect moment. But the truth is that I combed that area again and again, hoping in vain that it might have been a shoal of big perch in the area, but I never got another touch.

It did however confirm that the Coventry canal perch at least haven't spawned yet, as this one definitely had spawn in it and had a very swollen vent. I can't deny being confused as I was sure as predators, the perch would have spawned already to give those little munchy baby perch a good head start.

The view from above.

For some time now Google maps and Bing maps have played a very active role in my angling. Really, I don't think there's many dinner times go by when I don't at some point have a little looky-loo on one of the two online maps to scope out somewhere I might be planning on fishing. Google maps I find best for just general scrolling in satellite mode and for when I want to have a look over a bridge here or there to see what the cover looks like on a canal. Bing maps is my go to if I want a bit more detail, as it has that rotate option that is sometimes made up of four images taken at different times, which can occasionally offer a gem of an image that makes me go wow! One of the best examples of this was a few years ago when I was scoping out a lake I was about to fish for tench. The Google option was OK, but when I found it using Bing maps and rotated the image a couple of times a view of the small lake came up which had been taken on a calm sunny day when the water was gin clear. Every gravel bar, weed bed and gully was visible. Then a few days later I found myself on the lake opting to fish a gully between two bars where I was sure a week's worth of prevailing wind might have inclined the tench to patrol. The result was me smashing the place up and landing a load of tench all from that one spot at the bottom of the gully.

Back to the point. I was sitting filling my face with couscous, hummus and some rather tangy feta one day last week as I worked my way along the Grand Union canal tow path in Google maps, when I spotted a feature that looked irresistible. Even on the screen from a few hundred feet above it looked the perfect predator holding spot. The only fly in the ointment was that I was already planning a morning on Napton reservoir to see if I could winkle out any perch or pike. A small diversion on route though could give me an hour to check and see if this newly located area might have any mileage predator-wise.

On the day when I arrived the conditions were less than perfect, with wall to wall blue skies and the blazing sun chasing away the cold quickly. The canal was very coloured and the wind whipped down it, keeping the water constantly moving. The movement of the water though actually for once played into my hands, as the feature I was targeting was an opening to a marina on the tow path bank. By fishing it from up-wind side the waters tow drew my dead bait rig perfectly into what, on a river, would be a crease. I suspected that this area at the mouth of the marina might be a magnet to predators wanting to ambush prey fish moving in and out of the opening.

I'd only been casting round a lure for a few minutes before the float which I had set over depth popped up straight, did a couple of bobs and began sliding off into the main canal. After waiting as long I dared I struck into a decent fish which went mental, zooming around the canal before heading back towards me, where I bundled a nice looking zander into the waiting net.

Not a bad first fish from a new spot.

After releasing that zander I got a bait straight back out on the spot and began casting around trying to find something on the lure. Last year I purchased some Diawa duck fin shads whilst in a Angling Direct store and for some reason I had overlooked them ever since. Normally I would have been using a lighter outfit, but as I was going somewhere else I had opted to bring my medium weight rod to try and fish some bigger lures, rather than the smaller ones I generally use on the canals. Having this heavier outfit seemed the perfect time to try out the Duck fin shads. They felt amazing, with the vibrating from the tail of the lure reverberating all the way up the line through the rod. With all the disturbance they cause I knew I would get hit sooner or later, and I did when a pike thumped the lure right under my feet. Somehow after playing it right to the net, the little bugger threw the hook by thrashing around, mouth open. It didn't matter though as three casts later I am sure the same fish struck again as I lifted the shad off the bottom. 

I was pretty chuffed with landing two canal beasties in under half and hour and was sorely tempted to bin off my Napton session and stick around, but I really want to try and unlock the code to the Napton predators as I think it has so much to offer. So I stuck with the plan and opted to return to this spot again soon for a dedicated session, hopped in the van a drove off to my original engagement

If you don't know or haven't fished at Napton reservoir it's a kind of heaven or hell type water. On its best day when the weather is fine and the fish are feeding it's wonderful. Good tench, big perch, savage pike and rare crucians that make your eyes bulge clean out your head. If it's cold and the wind is blowing it can be the worst place on earth and on those occasions even if the fish are feeding it can be near impossible to fish, or to keep warm for that matter.

There was a good wind blowing across both halves of the lake and although on any normal place this wouldn't of been an issue, here the breeze that caused the ripple felt ten times worse than normal. The water did have a slight tinge of colour to which is actually unusual for Napton.

Using a ten gram jig and various colourful lures I worked my way around targeting any features first, followed by covering open water. Even in the normally perch filled spots I couldn't land myself a nice Sargent. I reckon on this occasion the size of the lures I was using might have worked against me and using smaller lures may have incited at least some attention from smaller fish, but really it wasn't small perch I wanted.

Having worked all the more comfortable water with no interest of any kind I had no choice but to fight it out and stand toe to toe with the wind. With the breeze coming straight into my face, any direct casts were cut short by more than half and any angled casts streamed out my braided line in a massive loop. It was hard work in truth, but having caught nothing on more sheltered bits of the lake I hoped there could be something on the windward bank.

With all the rocks that have found their way out into the lake from the bank it can be confusing actually getting a bite. I'd bumped into several convincing rocks with the lure and struck at them before I got another distinct bump, this one however turned into a fish. My first little Napton pike of the year was freezing cold and covered in leeches.

Although it turned out to be the one and only fish of the Napton half of my session, it actually feels pretty good to finally get some predator action from this lake. Maybe now the weather is warming up the perch might once again turn up and you never know, I might even dust off the float fishing gear and have a crack for the tench and dare I say....crucians, later in the year.

Old schoolies.

There are a few old canal haunts of mine that I had been thinking about getting back to for a long while now, but the only thing is that these old haunts have in recent years been acquired by a new fishing club. Now truthfully I have never been big on joining clubs to fish on canals. I think it's a bit of a grey area regarding clubs laying claim to canals, as generally they make no effort whatsoever to bailiff or look after them and as anyone can just tootle on up and fish without being approached, then in my mind it's basically a free for all. 

That was until the Lure Anglers Canal Club came along. This relatively new club seems to be a new, different sort of club, unlike the stuffy old relics that cling on to their old canal stretches just in case the river is out of sorts or they've got a match on their one and only pool. Online membership, regular fish-ins and a well organized lure league. If all of that wasn't appealing enough to make me purchase the bargain £20 membership, the fact that they have under their control some twenty five miles of prime canal that will never get electro fished to remove zander, certainly is. So after joining up via the Internet and harassing the chairman with a few questions, my membership pack arrived and I added a Crimewatch classic photo to my membership card ready to hit some old haunts.

Wanted in connection to crimes against fishing lures.

My first short foray was to a section of the Grand Union that used to be a quality bit of water. Apart from the fact that it was late in the afternoon and the boats were thumping down the canal, it turned out to be an interesting return. Straight away I found a couple of small schoolie zander lying in the deeper water where the locks raging water had scoured away the silt. I moved away from the lock after it was opened and targeted a deep section of cover small a red spikey shad on a three gram jig tight into the cover, where I picked up a slightly bigger than average schoolie.

Along with the boats one other thing was proving to be a bit problematic; large swathes of the canal surface was littered with hundreds of thousands of spent catkins that had been blown from the trees lining the banks. Although pretty innocuous, these little buggers made casting the lures a nightmare. They got hung up on line and leader knots, they were so thick in some cases that the line could even get through them and the lure didn't sink. Even moving spots didn't help that much as when the locks opened up the collections of them moved on mass along the canal.

I finished up having to really pick where I was casting carefully, but even doing that I still managed to root out a few more small zeds fishing tight to the concrete structures above and below the many locks dotted along this section of canal, using curly tailed grubs.

A couple of days later I was back on the same canal but few miles downstream to meet up with Mick for a session. It had been a dreadful night weather-wise, with storms battering the south of the country. Although we seemed to have been spared much of the wind, the rain had really come down and was predicted for a large part of the morning.

Given that my faithful waterproof smock has grown a little tighter of late I had to make do with a stinky old poncho that has been lingering in my car boot where I'd dumped it since last year and looking like a proper old bank tramp I wandered off into the rain to find Mick.

Not long after hooking up with my accomplice for the morning I got the first tentative signs of action. Having brought a dead bait rod for this session which I had flicked out onto the edge of the trench as I was searching around for a tug on the lure. The small float sprang to life first when a tiny zander thought his luck was in and found my roach head. That one came off, but in the next spot I hooked and landed a slightly better one which objected to being photographed and made a slippery escape back into the canal as I fumbled with my camera. 

As we moved down the canal we came across a slightly sticky situation. A pair of swans had decided to nest literally right next to the tow path. With what looked like Mum on the nest and Dad lurking on the canal, slipping between them was done quickly with a definite squeak of the arse as you went. I've seen how aggressive nesting swans can be and this set up has got 'attacked dog walker' written all over it.

Worst of all was the fact that after doing the swan slip once, the pounding wind and rain turned us back for a second pass as we backtracked into the cover. Once cast out between some boats, Mick had a couple of small zeds and lost a better one on his dead bait rod, before I snagged a very spawn filled perch on the jig from the centre of the canal. Obviously still to spawn, the perch have me a bit confused as I would of thought with them being predators they would have spawned already.

The highlight of the session was still to come though. After fishing a few fruitless areas we came to a heavy bit of cover which looked right to both of us. Mick cast his dead bait out on the right hand side of what is now called 'Mick's bush' and I cast mine to the left. As we searched around with small jigs, Mick's dead rod showed signs of life. His strike was met with a good bend in the rod and straight away we both knew it was a good fish. I barely got hold of the net before he was doing the F*~# F*~# F*~# zander lament into the sky knowing he'd lost a big one. Then within ten minutes my float sank off like a U boat submerging. I struck and my rod bent round as another big fish shook its head. It was on long enough for me to see a long light shape under the water then it too came off leaving me cursing the sky like a mad man.

Really I thought that was it until after a little while Mick's recast float did a few different movements. He held that rod for ages waiting for some kind of definite movement. After watching the float move like a crayfish was doing one with the bait for ages, he finally struck and once again a big fish was on. This time it never got away and elated by the sight of a new PB zander, Mick was all smiles. We both thought it was bigger than it turned out to be, but even a pound and a half lighter than originally predicted it was still a brilliant fish of  7.6lb which I was really happy to see become Micks new PB.

I don't think either of us will ever be sure if we stumbled onto the land of the giants in the 'Mick's bush' swim or if it was the same fish that struck thrice. I've personally seen the same zander caught and landed twice in the same session, as well as the same fish pick up, come off and come back again a few times, so part of me says it was the same fish on all three runs. But then there is part of me that loves the idea of a rogue pack of big zander mooching around like they own the cut.

That was it for the action for the day and considering the weather conditions weren't exactly enjoyable, we did have a good session in the end. The old haunts seem to be as good as they ever where and hopefully any skills and knowledge I've learnt since I last fished these stretches will help me stick some nice fish in the net. I can't wait to get out again and have already made plans to get on another tasty looking bit of new canal on the LACC waters as soon as I can to try and find myself a big old Grand Union monster zed.

Unexplored areas and canal trolling

My young son BB and his growing teeth have no respect for my fishing plans as yet. I was all keen to get out for a decent session after a few poorly executed trips prior to this. The day before I had diligently readied my kit for an early start and went to bed anticipating going to a far off spot that has form for better than average fish. Needless to say after spending most of the night taking it in turns getting up to settle our disturbed little one, both me and JB looked much as we did on the way back from Glastonbury festival in ninety seven, only without having any of the fun.

By the time I had grabbed enough unbroken sleep and done the decent thing and got the now radiant little munchkin up, dressed and fed there seemed little point travelling half way across the county to find the dog walkers had taken all the parking spots at the initial venue. So still half dazed I settled to instead go and check out a bit of the Grand union canal I haven't fished before above Hatton locks.

It's weird but I've done a fair bit of zander fishing on the locks themselves and below them, but have never once been above them. I must have crossed the bridge to go to Hatton country world a hundred times and it's always looked nice. A few friends have fished it and said it's not bad up there, but for some reason I've not yet been. So this seemed a perfect opportunity for a bit of an explore.

Even though I am not big on paying to park when fishing, the paltry £1.20 is a bargain and I happily left my car there whilst I tabbed off up the lock flight. It was on my way up that I came across something I've never seen before first hand. Someone had left  the upper gate of one of the locks open and with the ubiquitous leak the lower gates seem to have, most of the water had leaked from the pound, draining it down to the small pool at the bottom of the picture which was being kept topped up by the leaking gate above. Gravity and a night of flowing water passing over it had carved the soft silt quickly down to a nice gravel run into the open gate at the top of the picture.

I could have spent all day just peering into the drained pound at the various detritus collected and at the topography of the bottom. There must have been a few thousand snails on the marginal shelf alone, never mind on the huge silt bank at the back of the pound. I had my suspicions that the pool at my feet contained any other residents of the pound and tempting as it was to have a poke around in there, I left well alone knowing full and well how stressed any occupants of the little left water would be.

Once I actually got fishing I quickly caught a couple of small zander casting small salt and pepper zander shads around above the first lock in the brown tinted clear water.

Once a local barge enthusiast came reversing into the area I was fishing a little too enthusiastically, I decided it was time to get off and explore the new to me tow path.

Canal trolling

Features play an important part in all types of fishing and personally I have always tried to find something that might attract predators and me alike when I am fishing for them. The unseen underwater features are obviously problematic to locate, but the obvious ones like good far bank cover or big reed beds are always the first targets on new waters and a good starting place. 

These tempting target spots can sometimes be spaced out and the travelling between them has always felt a little of a waste of fishing time to me. So I recently concluded to do a bit of canal trolling as I was travelling down the tow path between spots. When I was a kid we used to do this to little avail using shiny silver spinners, now though having a few years and a lot more experience under my belt I realize that I was doing it all wrong. 

As a kid I naively thought a pike would chase any lure fished in the canal. Now I know that sometimes you have to drag it right across their noses in many cases to provoke a response. So after a bit of fine tuning and figuring how much line to pay out I have begun trolling baits along the marginal shelf as I walk between spots. This enables me to fish whilst travelling and why not, as a lot of fish lie up on the nearside shelf and I reckon I might find a few nice surprises by using this time a bit better.

It was as I passed under a bridge and past a row of barges on the far bank that my rod which was sticking out over the canal bent round. Either I'd found another branch lingering on the shelf or something had grabbed the white shad as it passed by. It turned out to be the latter as the line shot out into the centre trench. This wasn't a perch or even a zander, this was something much bigger and rarer than those spiky finned culprits.

My light lure rod was bent alarmingly over as the yellow braided line cut across the surface towards the boats. It had to be a pike which had snatched the trolled lure as it went by, as not much else bar a carp would pull my string this hard. Praying my fluro leader would hold, I followed the fish off up the canal hoping it wouldn't bite me off. I must have played it for five minutes before I caught a glimpse of a dull spotted tail in the boil in the centre of the canal. It wasn't a humongous pike but it certainly looked like it could be around ten pounds. I really thought I was getting the better of the fish and was fumbling to open up my folded net went the fish came up and turned back in a massive boil and sent my lure flying through the air.

That one experience with a decent canal pike has proved my theory valid enough to certainly continue this practice whenever I find myself travelling between fishing features on the canal, and given the stature of this validating fish I feel I might well have to give some shallow running plugs a run out along with a wire trace just in case.

Daffodils, pike and more pike.

Although my time of late has been largely dedicated to the canals I have to say some of that has not been my choice. I had planned to spend quite a bit of my winter fishing on a few selected seasonal spots on both running and still water, but the weather being what it has the last few months, most of my targets have been out of sorts. Really I have felt like I have been waiting for some item of fruit to ripen before I pick it with these venues. Should I be currently into barbel or chub fishing then with the warm coloured conditions I would have been out waiting for a rod tip to wrap over making the most of the conditions. But I am not, and waiting for any kind of winter clarity to appear has been nothing more than torture. Having got to the stage where free fishing time and good conditions seem as likely to coincide as my winning the lottery, I took a chance and booked a day off in the week on what seemed to be a quiet bit of upcoming weather.

Well bugger me if the gamble didn't pay off and little by little the rivers dropped and cleared. Now the only problem was not trying to cram to much into one session with all the options I had. In the end I headed over to Warwick to fish the Myton road stretch of the Avon. In short it was pure week day winter fishing heaven with a distinct lack of boat wankers and impromptu matches cluttering up the river. The water was clear and I leisurely worked my way along the stretch casting savage gear 3D bleak and fox zander shads on 10gram jigs across the flow and bouncing them back slowly to try and entice a strike.

My first hit came relatively soon on, and the hard fight deceived me into thinking it was a much bigger pike than it turned out to be and surprisingly was also the only one of the entire outing. 

The only other taker on this enjoyable return to running water was the greediest perch in Warwickshire, who at the end of a retrieve when I was fastidiously bringing the lure right up tight to the bank, shot out and engulfed my 12cm red head zander shad like it was little more than a tiny minnow.

Now although I found my return to the river most enjoyable, my next session was to the old estate lake which also finds itself at the mercy of the bad weather. Being a classical stream fed sort of lake and given that much of the small stream which feeds life into it runs through farm land, it swells easily with any mucky run off from the fields. Only once over the winter have I dared to make the efforts to walk its banks and then I caught it half way clear and still very shrouded by winter.

This time when I stepped onto the estate it was a riot of yellow with every tree, wall and road framed by yellow daffodils in bloom.

The pike were hungry and very aggressive in the now clear water and after establishing that they were spread out all over the lake waiting in ambush amongst the submerged lilies which were beginning to sprout the new year's growth, it was just a case of figuring how best to provoke them. On this occasion it seemed working a floating jerk bait half depth in the shallows proved stimulating enough to bring a slew of aggressive jack pike thrashing at my lure.

Catching two or three small pike in each swim quickly covered half the lake and I soon found myself looking towards the deeper stream entrance to target fish. For this I reverted back to the ever faithful jig and zander shad combo which instantly got a reaction.

Even the strength of my gear and knots was validated when I snagged up on a serious lily rhizome. The new 0.18mm power pro super 8 slick braid I am using along with a 30lb wire trance and a Palomar knot all held fast as I yanked a large chunk of rhizome off the bottom in the stream entrance.

On this occasion every area I seemed to fish held loads of little pike which were very keen to attack. I can't imagine any fish in this lake ever feels secure given the amount of predators swimming around under the water. In the end I caught so many the savage little critters were beginning to look quite cute to me. 

Towards the end of the session I got a very different hit! Whilst covering a slightly deeper area where I suspect the streams flow scours away the silt, I was bouncing the zander shad slowly into the trench by lifting the rods slowly and then leaving a longish pause as the lure rested on the bottom. As the lure dropped once again I saw the yellow braid tighten and I struck. The line instantly changed direction as something shot off to my right. The fight was much different to the all the pike I had already caught, so I suspected a big perch may have crashed the party. The still unseen fish was really hammering me and when I saw a deep dark flank roll deep down in the clear water my heart began pounding and the thought of a massive estate lake Sargent looked to be a reality. 

To say I was shocked when a bream surfaced would be an understatement. Obviously this bream had never heard that it was meant to fight like a wet sack or that bream don't take lures either. Really I can't quite figure out what happened here. Was this bream attracted to investigate the strange lure moving past and take it in its mouth, or was it simply docilely sucking at the bottom when my lure smashed it full in the mouth.

Rightly I can't decide, so in the loosest possible way I am going to mark it down as a genuine hit. But saying all that, what a perch that would have made!

Canal grubbing.

Quite simply my latest outing on the tow path was an unmitigated disaster. Really I probably should have ventured to the river, but I was guilty of waiting for what I thought would be optimum conditions (which might not come at this rate). So I headed to the Coventry canal to see if I could try and pin down any groups of zander or perch in the area.

The moment I laid eyes on the canal I should have got back in the car and gone to another stretch. Probably being a bit pig-headed I thought I could root something out, but the conditions were against me with a big drop in temperature. The section I was on is very susceptible to a north wind battering which seemed to have stirred up the sediment as well, leaving the section where I was very coloured whilst reports that it was clear on sheltered areas northward.

As I mooched the tow path persevering, I came across something interesting though. The canals with their infestation of crayfish have really begun to suffer with collapsing banks. I never thought it was that much of an issue until I spoke to a chap on a work party a few years ago. He explained to me that the crayfishes burrowing was speeding up the erosion rates on sections that aren't lined with metal pilings. Anyway, the interesting thing I came across was that a large section of collapsed tow path had recently had new metal pilings installed and that behind them it had all been back filled. Given the lack of accessibility where I was, it doesn't seem likely they could have transported the material in to use to fill behind the piling. So more than likely I must have been sediment dug from the canal onto the bank.

This stuff was a treasure trove! As well as a of a couple hundred years of accumulated silt there was remnants of broken bottles, from the classic Budweiser bottle right back to vintage square pharmaceutical bottles, none of which were intact sadly. Along with bits of plastics and crisp packets dating back to my child hood was a lost or dumped American express card which went out of date fifteen years ago. But what interested me were the signs of aquatic life. Literally everywhere was peppered with shells. The amount of swan mussels alone was shocking, but they were outnumbered fifty to one by some kind of clam which it would seem at some point were very prevalent in this area.

I must've grubbed around kicking about in the newly exposed soil for a good three quarters of an hour hoping to find something good and in doing so began to see evidence that the soil was certainly from the canal bed. Weirdly though I had a little plumb around to see if the excavations had changed the depth, only to find little difference at all to what I would expect to find anywhere on the canal.

In the end I left and continued down the tow path and to maybe even find a fish or two. At the next spot I was trying to be a bit of a smart ass and began targeting a large half sunken branch which I thought might be a good holding area. First cast and my jig found a hold of the snag! Turns out my outfit and knots were capable of a bit more than I thought. The 8lb braid and 6lb fluro leader all held firm under pressure and just as I thought the line would give, the snag slowly moved towards me. With gentle pressure and my braid bedding down badly into the spool, I managed to drag that dammed snag all the way across the canal and right to the edge under me feet. The moment I grabbed hold of the stinking silt covered branch I wondered if there might be a lure or two hooked on it, and there was. Along with a few manky rubber lures was a shiny gem!

Whoever threw this into the Coventry cut needs their head looking at! From the shape of it I had an inkling of what it was, but if that wasn't enough it had the manufacturer printed on its back. It was Yo-zuri floating minnow which retails for around ten quid in the shops and it didn't look like it had been in the water long either. 

Finding that made a bad session a little easier to take, I can tell you. The rubbish/snag infested nature of the Coventry especially is the reason why I find myself reluctant to cast expensive lures into it. I myself have had days when I will lose three to five jig heads plus the accompanying rubber lures and losing them can total up to £10. Lose five top of the range hard lures and you could be looking at more like £50 or more.

In the end though the session came to naught really and even though it was interesting grubbing along the tow path and retrieving that lure was a plus point, I really should have followed my instincts and gone somewhere else on this occasion.

Does size really matter?

There is absolutely no doubt that light lure fishing has grown astronomically in popularity across the UK in the last few years and right now has to be one of the biggest growth areas of UK angling. I too have been swept up in this wave and find myself addicted to lure chucking. Though I must say for me a large part of its attraction lays in convenience rather than fashion, as it enables me to be out fishing with very little gear very quickly, which suits me with my little boy BB at home.

I have always prided myself on having a questioning mind and over fifteen months of cultivating my lure fishing experience a question has been growing in my mind. Does size really matter? Or more specifically does lure size really matter when it comes to zander? 

Pike and perch for now can be struck from this equation as I regularly see pike and perch attack lures that many would consider are either too small or too big to be eaten by either species. With zander though there does seem to be a ceiling size/weight that you can to catch using lighter lure tactics. Both first hand and second hand via social media I see loads of zander captures on lures of between a few ounces and four pounds. I myself have caught hundreds up to three and half pounds, with only two being over four.

Now, I know that as they get bigger, zander get rarer and this could be a large factor in this. But beyond that I am starting to wonder if a lot of smaller lures fail to register as a worthwhile meal for a bigger zed. I myself use a 1-10gram outfit for most of my canal fishing; as an example I generally use a 3-5 gram jig head with a rubber lure of 40-70mm in length. Now this as representation of a prey fish is actually a very small which leads me to the following question: is that too small of a fish for a bigger zed to bother chasing. It is a well known fact in pike at least, that what they need to grow truly big is a ready supply of big prey like bream or trout, hence the reason the Broads and trout waters produce so many big pike. Maybe that's true of zander too. In relative size terms maybe bigger zander need to be looking for something bigger than the average roach or perch, more along the size of a skimmer bream

Now I would never goes as so far as to say that to catch a bigger zander on a lure that you must use a big one, as a few examples of where a 'mates, cousins, dad had one on a micro lure' always crop up and I know better than making blanket statements about fishing. But surely using a bigger lure increases your chance of your lure, if it passes by a big fish, registering as a viable meal.

Obviously I would have to begin putting this theory into practice to stand any chance of finding out if a bigger lure might have any relative effect on the size of the zander caught. So with the river and other waters I want to fish out of sorts, I headed to a very reliable section of canal which holds healthy stock of zander. It also seemed a great opportunity to have a go with a new medium weight Shimano yasei ax player rod I acquired recently. Now although I got this rod with more plugs and jerk baits in mind, it is listed as an all round lure rod and it's weight rating of 10-30 grams means it should be perfectly able to handle my scaled up jig tactics.

Now I really didn't want to go over the top to start with and knowing what sort of condition the canal would probably be in I opted to scale up what had already been a very successful winter zander lure for me. Normally on my light outfit I would fish a 2.5" curly tailed grub on a 3 gram jig which gives you an overall weight of just under 5 grams. Not having any massive curly tail grubs at my disposal I opted for a 4" twin tail on a 10 gram jig head, which gave an overall weight of 14 grams. Now I know this might not seem a massive scaling up, but the smaller option is half of what can be cast on my light rod and the scaled up also is just about half of what can be cast on the medium rod. Also I didn't want to go from a tiny lure to a humongous one and fail at the first hurdle, so my hope was that a subtle increase in size would act as good steeping stone from small to large. 

I was quite up for it when I got to the canal, but the state of the water was ten times worse than I expected. On the way I was thinking it might be a bit coloured. When I got there its water has turned into milky strong tea. I didn't have a back up venue though so it was always going to be a case of fighting through it and doing the best I could. On the bright side though the zander, with the very turbid water and mid teen temperature, should have been on the feed.

After two hours casting at every feature from every possible angle a few hundred times, I thought I was way off with this theory and that it was just going to be total a wash out. Then out of the blue I felt a hint of hit as the lure dropped and the line changed angles. I was into a fish and lo and behold, it was a small zander. 

With the blank avoided it did relieve a little of the pressure I was putting on myself, which in turn boosted my confidence to continue casting. It took probably close to another fifty casts to find a second small zed tight to my own bank on top of the marginal shelf, and this one was even smaller than the first one.

After this one though I couldn't find another taker as dusk set in and I found myself casting all the way into dark thinking I might just get one last take.

It wasn't exactly any kind of result as I only caught two small zander using the bigger lure and not catching anything near the realms of a bigger zander. But I think this is definitely a theory that I should continue to try through the year to get any real evidence that bigger lures might equal bigger zander. One thing I do feel a little stupid for is not doing this a bit sooner, as it might seem that the smaller zander will take a bigger lure anyway. So if I had been throwing some slightly bigger lures round this past year at least, then the chances are I could have still caught a lot of the fish I have whilst standing a better chance of rousing a big one to have pop at my lure.

Now though a second question has come to mind: how big of a lure will these smaller zeds take before they get put off thinking it's too big to eat?