Keep on the move

One of the biggest lessons I learned this year was during the World Feeder Championships on the Ostellato Canal in Italy.

For those that don’t know, the Ostellato is a wide canal, around 85m on average, with bream and skimmers plus odd carassio the target species.

The only problem was that it’s also full of tiny zander of around half-an-ounce apiece.

These zander were like piranhas, and once they found your spot catching ‘proper’ fish became very difficult.

The best way to get around this was to keep on the move.

By this I mean we would kick off fishing a spot and we’d start to catch skimmers and the odd bream, then maybe an hour into the match zander bites became more and more of an issue.

To overcome this it was a case of starting a new line 2m to the left of the original spot.

This resulted in another burst of skimmers before the process had to be repeated again.

When we eventually ran out of room we simply took a metre or two off the clip and fished past the feed.

It was almost as though the skimmers were always the first fish to come to the bait, but were then eventually bullied out by the tiny zander.

It was amazing how effective this tactic was, because instead of only catching from the off we were able to put fish in the net for the full five hours.