Zander, Your Veiws.

[Ed Matysiak]

From what i have read their feeding habbits are very different to pikes. They enjoy hunting by night, prefer to chase a moving bait and like gold colours. As soon as i find a water near by that hold them i will be off with my lures. I will also be putting them back and p***ing some people off !

[Peter Waller]

Lurking Pike:

Surley you wouldn't use it for the intended reason would you?    :confused:                    

Shhhhhhhh, don't let on! Still haven't got the Realtree strides so I'm not a real carper!!!

[Lurking Pike]

nice one peter

[Lurking Pike]

Well this has been a good topic and i thoroughly enjoyed reading your replies.

[Apache]

Hear Hear, and to have a nice discusiion and find out points of view.

[Lurking Pike]

If we are in the House of commons, shall i blend in with the crowd and fall asleep. lol

[Steve Burke]

Lurking Pike:

Peter Waller. Pike have a stronger bite than Zander(Even a weak pike) and Pike dont mess about with a bait they grab it and then twist it round on its head facing their gob and run.

Like Tinca, I disagree about the behaviour of pike here too. (I'm not qualified to comment on zander).

 

Pike will all too often eat a bait on the spot leading to difficulties in spotting a take. Over the years I've found they certainly don't always run off with the bait.

 

It's not just wised-up pike on heavilly fished waters either. In fact I have the same problem sometimes on Wingham, where apart from the very occasional guest I don't allow piking. Additionally most of the little piking I do is lure fishing so the pike very, very rarely see deadbaits.

 

I well remember one day at Wingham when I was fishing deadbaits on a sunken float paternoster.

I was using a front alarm in conjunction with adjustable Fox Pike Swingers to keep some tension on the line. Three times I got single bleeps on the alarm, and when retrieved the baits were marked. The fourth time (yes, I'm slow on the uptake!) I struck. The result was a mid-double and this was followed by many more, resulting in one of my best days piking at Wingham. Significantly, none of the pike ran with the bait that day.

 

I grant you that on most occasions pike do run with the bait. However the days when they don't are when your bite indication has got to be first rate to avoid the chance of killing the fish. You've also got to be alert, on top of all your rods and strike immediately.

 

Incidentally, I do applaud the attitude of the young generation of pike anglers. The vast majority think carefully about the care of the fish, and could give some of their elders a lesson. Unfortunately few such dinosaurs will read these words. In fact I suspect many of them don't read anything about fishing at all!

 

[ 02. June 2003, 02:24 PM: Message edited by: Steve Burke ]

[doc_tench]

I have had a bit of experience with Zander and can say that sometimes the bite of a Zander can sometimes be just as gentle as a pike!

I say this through experience of catching them in rivers and in stillwater over the years.

Infact i have found that the bigger the Zander the more chance of this happening especially fishing on static dead baits.

Young Zander hunt in large packs and will snap and kill anything in its path if it can hold on to its prey whilst its on the move it will if not injured prey or dead prey will fall to the bed behind the pack.Along comes the larger Zander usually in 2's or 3's behind the pack picking up anything lying around or injured prey.

The reason why i have noticed this over the years is that whilst live baiting (although i dont livebait anymore my choice nobody elses!!) the livebait has been attacked but quite often has not been taken, everything calmes down only to have minutes later a largish Zander to take it, if it was hit first time then it always seemed to be a smaller fish and if i hauled the bait in it was always marked or sometimes just dead, I always new that if the bait was not taken first time i was in with a chance especially if the livebait was injured in someway or even killed i would leave it out there for atleast a further 10 minutes or so.I know what you are going to say "so how do you know after the first attack whether it had been taken? If the buzzer or float did not scream off i would check the bait by just bringing it in a little just to make sure that a slow bite or a first gentle bite by a lone biggy had not taken place.

Maybe i am waffling off the point here but on occasions nothing would happen for 10 minutes but if there was a single bleep i always struck.

My biggest ever Zander was caught in this way on a stillwater(14lb 2 oz). The bailiff who happen to be there at the time said to me "No mate i think thats Crayfish" as one single bleep came out on which i replied i can't take that risk and struck into the fish. If i had waited then i could have deep hooked the fish and with Zander that really is dangerous as there mouths are quite small and a deep hooked zander is really trouble.

So i guess with all the good advice on pike and striking straight away then its the same for Zander infact its even more important (if i am allowed to say that) and please do not if you ever catch one pull the hooks from the zanders stomach cut the trace as close as you can to the hooks and realease it, and use a single hook if baiting and also use....

I could go on forever but please remember whilst they are not the most popular fishes in our system they deserve to be treated as good as the next pike or tench or bream.

Tight lines

[phil dean]

Here here, that's my view on Zander, I've caught a few and always released them save where they have been deep hooked due to my ignorance which thankfully alot of reading and this site has hopefully changed. Where I did make the mistake, the fish was quickly dispatched and taken home....and they do taste nice as steve has said.

[Lurking Pike]

Wel guy's we all have the same point of view.