An evening after pike

After my somewhat disastrous bike and pike trip last week, I decided to have another go at targeting the toothier species on a local club water with my friend Steve. We stocked up on dead baits and wire traces at Lobby's (our local tackle shop) and set off for a few hours bait fishing after work.

The sun sets over our local club water

We each took 3 pike rods and a quiver tip to try and catch some live bait. My plan was to fish a small ledgered roach dead bait to the sunken trees on the far bank, a ledgered mackerel at my feet in the deep water (around 30ft) against the dam wall, and then attempt to catch some live bait on the feeder rod to use under a pike float and let it drift around the open water. This proved trickier than I expected as it turns out feeder fishing in deep water has its problems that I wont go into here. Anyway, after a few skimmers that were too big, I managed to bag a little roach that promptly got lip hooked on a double hook, set at about 20 foot depth under a small pike float and gently cast into the water. The weather conditions were looking pretty good, we'd had a fair bit of rain earlier in the day brought in on a south westerly wind, and it was meant to stay overcast for the remainder of the day, so we were pretty confident of getting a fish out between us.

The first run came about an hour in, from one of Steve's rods fishing the trees on the far bank. Sadly all he had to show for it was an old rotten stick as whatever had picked up his rig had made off with his roach and deposited the hooks in one of the sunken trees. It was about another hour before we saw any more action, this time it was my rod with the roach dead bait. I saw the rod tip bounce, before a few beeps of the alarm and a slow rotation of my freespool indicated something had picked up my bait. I hit the run almost instantly to avoid deep hooking, as piking legend Mick Brown had pointed out in a recent facebook post that the water temperature was unseasonably high and as such pike are much more likely to wolf down their food straight away. It turns out I may have hit it too early, as I managed to pull the bait straight out of the fishes mouth. Upon inspecting my dead bait however, there were clear marks on the fishes flanks between my sets of trebles that looked more like it had been attacked by one of those staple removing tools than a pike, which led me to believe I was dealing with another toothy resident of the water...

I re-baited the hooks with a fresh bait, this time placing the bottom hook right in the area where the tooth marks had been, and recast to the same spot. About 20 minutes later the rod was off again, and this time I left it for 2 or 3 seconds before hitting the run. I was into what felt like a half decent fish, it didn't zoom off and seemed to use its weight to stay down deep in the water. It took a few minutes to get it to come up from the deep water, and it turned out it wasn't very big after all! But it wasn't a pike either. My suspicions had been confirmed, and I had myself my first ever zander. Not a monster by any means weighing in at just a smidging over 3lb, but it was another new PB so I was happy!

My first zander, caught on a small roach dead bait

I rigged up with another small roach and put the rod back on the spot, hoping it was just 1 of a small pack of hunting fish, and also re-cast the mackerel rod to the far bank as this seemed to be where the fish were. It only took about 5 minutes before something had picked up the mackerel, though sadly it dropped it again almost instantly. After that we didn't have any more interest, despite staying an hour into darkness which is when the water usually comes alive, so we decided to call it a day and reeled in.