Zed Tactics

To all you Zed hunters out there, I fished the river Ebro in Spain all of last year for Cats and found that there's some huge Zander about also. My largest last season was 16lbs 12oz. The only problem i seemed to come across was the Zander feeling the weight of my lead and dropping the baits ... anyway of solving this ? the leads have to be of reasonable size as the river flows hard. Any advice at all on rigs and how to hook baits more affectively would be apprecaited dearly.
Tight lines !
Dan Sales =)

Is it possible to rig up baits on float gear and trot them through the swim? Have u tried lures for them?? Maybe get a back eddie and let the float swim round and round in it.

Try bolt rigging 'em, with the bait hooked head-up. Zander often hit the middle/tail end of a livie. The reason for this is they don't always kill and engulf prey in one rush like pike, they kill it first then swallow it.

I reckon a lot of these dropped takes aren't dropped takes at all. They either kill your livie, it sinks to the bottom and they just swim of and chase something else, or they keep on killing when they're not hungry, maybe it's an instinctive shoal thing.

Or try float fishing on rivers, or even paternostering with the float on top. It gives you far more idea of what's going on in the water.

I suspect it isn't quite like the Ouse amnd other rivers I usually fish - try Ian Wakeford on the predator-fishing.co.uk site, he's fished it loads and knows several others who go over there.

Rob, have tried lures yeh ... but I gace up with them very quickly as all i seemed to catch was very small Zeds. I was using small rubber shads with small jig heads, any other kind of lure that you think would result in bigger fish? Will deffinately try float fishing more often but my favourite method is still with a dead bait smack bang on the bottom as it produced so many fish last year. Thanks for ya advice, you'll be sure to hear from me again for more !
cheers,
Dan

Chris, thanks for the reply. Will try each and every method you mentioned and to bo honest there are quite a few things I think I need to learn about these Zeds. Last year was my first year at them and I was very pleased with the results I had, but I would like to improve. How big exactly to Zander grow ? My biggest was just over 16lbs, is that big or relatively small ?
Anyway, best be off as I'm install for my first ever night session after Zeds, hopefully the first few will start showing now.
Thanks again,
Dan

16 pounds is a good fish!!

U say u are using small rubber shads...my reaction would be to use big shads..hehe.

The vibrating lures like Sugar Shads etc seem to work well also...but i am sure Chris can help more as he has far more experience of Zeds than I do.

Good luck!

I've hardly caught any on lures, despite a few goes at it.

The only ones I've found that worked were those rubber screw-tail grubs or little Toby spoons.

There's an old boy that fishes bits of the river me and Andy Doughty fish and he has a few on rubber lures like Banjo minnows, shads etc.