I read about them as a child in my Gran's books but they weren't in the Observer's Book of Freshwater Fishes. However my Brooke-Bond tea card set included a tantalising picture, but I didn't see one in the flesh until after I moved to East Anglia. In the last 10 years I have seen them spread from a few Fenland drains, up the River Great Ouse, and thence into Grafham Water, and I've even caught a few.
The first one I saw was caught by a small boy. After chatting with him for a while I realised that he really knew what he was doing and that the best thing for me to do was copy him. He float-fished a dead bleak through the lilies, weed and other debris at the side of a deep weir-pool. He didn't use a wire trace because zander have a sensitive, gummy mouth with widely spaced gnashers. The dead bleak was attached by the lip to a small treble or a large single hook and the last couple of inches of line, down to the knot, were covered by a soft tube. This was probably enough to stop pike biting through the line.
Using the same rig as him, I had my first success straight away, but over the next few trips I modified the set-up a bit. Pike gave me a lot of bother and I hated the idea of leaving a hook in one, so I used a fine wire trace but kept the rubber tubing on to stop the zander from feeling the wire. Later I used green, soft-coated wire. My other modification was to hook the bait through the tail, in the belief that most predators like to swallow their meals head first.
I soon found myself in trouble with the local club because they don't allow dead-baiting with freshwater baits. I find this understandable, but misguided. Surely it is better to use healthy baitfish from your own stretch of water rather than bring in frozen fish that might bring in diseases from somewhere else Anyway, zanders don't like salt-water baits, though people do catch them using lampreys, eels and smelt.
My freezer happened to be full of rainbow trout so I thought I would try one for bait. If I hooked one of these through the tail and tried to cast it I'd get a hernia since they weigh a couple of pounds each. Would a shapeless, bleak-sixed, pink off-cut really work as well as a perfectly formed, fresh bleak? Oh yes!
You can cut the skinny belly strips off your trout with a pair of scissors when you clean them and keep the rest for eating. The strips are bony and don't have a lot of meat but the skin is white and tough so it looks fishy and holds the hook well. I cut it into elongated triangles, maybe 4 inches long, rather like a bait you might use for mackerel. It catches pike of all sizes as well as zanders and sometimes perch. If you let it lie on the bottom at dusk you will also catch eels, whether you want to or not.
The big spoiler on all this fun is that you need to get up really early. Zander like low light and I have rarely caught a summer zander after 8 am. Once you have caught one you may have mixed feelings. They look great but don't fight nearly as well as summer pike do. They need gentle handling and shouldn't be kept out of the water any longer than necessary to take out the hook and snap a picture.
Spinning, plugging, rubber lures and even flies can catch zander, but dead-bait seems to me to work best. A lot of Grafham Water zanders find their way to the table after being caught on flies dragged on weighted lines near the bottom, but I have only caught small ones on a damsel nymph from the dam.
I have never killed a zander but I have eaten the similar American Wall-eye in restaurants and the firm, white boneless steaks were delicious. Pike and perch are very bony fish, but Zanders just have a few big bones that you can easily remove.
Should I be so positive about an introduced predator in my local river? Probably not, though it has to be remembered that the river is also inhabited by carp, barbel, wells, and signal crayfish (to name only a few of the bigger species) all of which are non-native here. The river itself is nothing like its natural self. It was tamed to power mills, then the races were removed when the river was canalised for navigation upstream as far as Bedford. Now it is really just a chain of ponds.
I always thought that zanders occurred naturally in the Rhine system and just never made it to the UK. Actually, they only crossed the Alps into Europe quite recently, bringing their name with them. I was amazed to see that they have been introduced into the USA and sold as wall-eye, so perhaps I've eaten them after all. The name is Greek and short for Alexander, meaning "defender of men".
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