It was my 3rd time at WPC England and again I was surprised by fish. I know the water, I have more competition experience but my results get worse every time. Bad luck? 😉
This year again some people cried that the water is to warm for pike fishing and this specie was excluded from the classification. Ok I can understand the worries but what about very sensitive zander? What is the difference? I know the difference – there is a strong pike lobby in the UK and not many people care about zander.
So at the end we had to catch 3 zander and 5 perch. To be honest it’s better for me because I think it’s really difficult to catch pike at Grafham. It’s really random and you need to be lucky when there are so many people fishing at the same time. I’ve improved my perch game and zander are my slaves ! (not this time … 😛 )
So the plan was simple – get 3 zander very quickly and then chase big perch … and we failed. For the first time zander were totally not active. What was the plan B? There was no plan B 🙂
Fortunately nobody was catching zander, so we finished the first day at 10th place with 2 big perch: 46 and 48 only a few centimeters from top positions. Plan for the next day had to be simple – we catch 2 (or 3 if possible) zander and we win it !
We chased zander for the whole day. We had our 20 minutes of bites and we hooked 2 nice ones. Unfortunately we lost both of them. The only two fish we caught were 2 medium perch. Of course we had a few stinky rainbows but they are not proper fish – it’s stocked meat for hungry fly anglers,
As we expected the final results were very bad and only the two first teams caught good zander, the guys from the 3rd place had only 5 big perch. We end up at 10th but with the biggest perch of WPC 2020 – 48 cm.
So was our plan correct? I still think so. To win it we had to catch zander.
We’ll do it next year 😉
Just discovered your blog. Great read already. Do you have any thoughts why the zander had shut down? The water was warmer than average. I can’t remember if there was an obvious thermocline. Did any of us try super shallow??
I tried all depths but to be honest it wasn’t something that I hadn’t experienced before. It happens every year at some reservoirs – zander disappear for long periods. Usually summer but sometimes it cab a whole year.
I think it’s related to the number of bait fish. In 2020 there ware millions of small perch and zander. So the big ones were always full up. They were active early in the morning and in the evenings.