Canal zander

Alex – We’ve been on another zander exploit! Carl and I just can’t stop thinking about zander, ever since our first session on Rutland water last year. It’s not only the beautiful scale patterns on the fish that make them such a great species to target, it’s the fact that however cold it is, they just seem to keep feeding. After catching a few zander from Rutland, we now wanted to try and target them on a canal or stillwater. Unfortunately for us, we live nowhere near a canal but we were very lucky to have an invitation to the Stratford-upon-Avon canal from local expert Jimmy Sallis, who’s had some great results in the past. So it was an early start on Saturday morning when we drove on the empty roads to Jimmy’s house. On arrival, there was even a couple of centimetres of snow that had settled during the night and it was biting cold. But in positive spirit we readied the kit and headed to the Warwickshire Avon which had produced some good zander for Jimmy. We gave it a good three hours, chucking lures in every likely looking swim we came across, but the river didn’t throw up any fish. This could possibly be due to the water level being up and coloured, or possibly down to the simple fact that we aren’t very good anglers! But after our fingers were nearly at freezing point we chose to head back to the van, warm up then go down to the canal and fish a few hours into dark using deadbaits. The canal spot Jimmy took us to next was really interesting with loads of moored up boats and a couple of bridges either side of us. It certainly looked good for a bite. We made a short walk to a spot Jimmy had fished in the past and caught zander to 11lb! We weren’t expecting that – just one fish would be nice! Before setting up any of the deadbait rods Carl had already made a couple of casts with the lure rod and was quickly into a little zander. We were all buzzing to be off the mark. What we didn’t realise was this was the start of a hectic evening’s fishing. Jimmy and I soon also caught

All the rods went at once when Alex (right) joined canal expert Jimmy Sallis