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Zander All my favourite Zander methods incorporate live or dead baits of some sort. I have caught my share on jigs, lures and whatnot - but without exceptions I have found that I catch far better fish on "real" baits. On one occasion when fishing a bay in the archipelago I float fished live herring on two rods and worked a jig on the third one. I caught some 40 Zander that day, divided equally between the methods, but none over 3 kilos on the jig - and only a handful below 3 kilos on the livebait! Another interesting test performed that day was using a wire trace on one rod. The rod with the wire trace was rewarded with exactly zero (0) bites. Avoid wire, if possible! Theis Kragh showed me once that wobbling deadbaits (Drachkovitch-style) can be tremendously effective at times, even more so than fishing with live-baits. Since then it has been one of my absolute favourite approaches to Zander-fishing (though it has never been as effective again!). I wobble the dead bait in slow motion, sometimes giving it a short jerk - that makes the bait dart away, then coming abruptly to a halt, then slowly starting to sink. The bites usually come when the bait is sinking. Takes when the bait it moving are, predominantly, from pike.
The major drawback of that style of fishing is that you do not cover much water, and it is a bit awkward in deep water. When I fish in deeper water, or when I have not located the fish, I generally troll floats and do a bit of bottom-bouncing. More often than not I fish two rods with floats set at different depth, one close to the bottom and one in mid-water. The third rod is fished as a bottom bouncer.
On days when it is too windy for trolling a drifter float is handy. Me and my friends have caught a lot of nice Zander (up to 7.7 kgs) using drifter floats. The larger specimens are generally caught far from the boat, possibly indicating that they are wary of boats.
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