Night Zander Jig

Beautiful fish! Does the shore access to the zander last all winter or at some point does the canal get locked in with ice? Unseasonably warm here so i should be able to keep fishing from shore for a while.

Yep......... i am going to have to try something similar to this. Since i do not pour my own stuff though, going to have to make due with some adjustments to the basic design and figure a way to attach an extended treble out the back. I have tried using the add on stinger hooks but they always get fouled up around the main hook and end up being almost as much trouble as having more than one treble.

We usually have mild, unstable winter weather. I´ts only every second year that ponds build up enough ice for skating and so. With all the traffic and turbulence, the canal hardly ever closes. Not sure about the upper water column bite though, its the first season I´ve tried this. Surface bite was supposed to be a summer phenomenon, only recently folks found out the night bite gets even better in winter when the water clears and daytime fishing becomes more difficult. They are said to become sluggish and stay deeper in very cold water though, we´ll see!

It is interesting that the 'night bite' is somewhat a new thing over there.  People go crazy here on Lake Erie during the Fall and it has been going on since i was a youngster.  Shore fishing usually starts the end of October and goes right up until the ice starts to form.  On cold nights you have to keep putting the end of your rod in your mouth to melt the eyes so you can keep casting.  They line up on the piers and rip-rap break walls and cast all hours of the night.  It gets busy in favorite spots where people show up before sunset to claim their spot!  Lots of people also troll from boats just out beyond the reach of shore anglers.  The best spots to fish change each night depending on where the shad school up.  The walleye come in close to feed on those shad.... and man do they get FAT on them!  Here is a picture that was posted on a local forum of a guy who was out just last night. (I did not catch these fish) That top fish is that stuffed with shad but still bit his lure!

View attachment 4

What is strange though, is that back when i first got introduced to this style of fishing (late 80's - early 90's), almost every single guy casting from shore was using a Rat-L-Trap style lure.  You would cast out and count down then start reeling.  The point was to try and keep the bait just off the bottom and even bumping the bottom every once in a while.  We would loose a lot of those lures down in the rocks.  I always assumed that those fish were staying tight to the bottom.  Now, pretty much every person is using the shallow diving stick baits and really only fishing the top 10 feet of water.  My guess is that there is a mix of shallow and deep fish out there the whole time.

Brought a fishing buddy tonight to help me getting decent no-dirt-no-lying-on-the-ground-pics suitable for advertising in forums that promote C&R. At first he did a good job netting and fotographing my 20" average zander, but then he found it appropiate to dwarf it and make a big Woo-ha with a 35" specimen.  So rude!

Really nice fish, did you get a weight on the 35 incher?

No, unfortunately, its an exceptional catch way beypnd Nils´s "kitchen window" and was released a.s.a.p.. He is a far more experienced zander angler than I am. Under daytime fishing his aggressive presentation of small plastics usually gets him 5-10 times more contacts and 2 times more landed fish than my calmly swum hairjigs, though this was the first time he got the bigger specimen. We started out on daytime and after 7 hours of fishing without a single contact he was getting raising concerns about getting skunked. He even whined about not ever having caught a 80cm fish in his 4 years of very intensive canal angling - had lost 2 but never landed one...
The fish took a 4" or so naturally colored shallow running stick bait.

Zander night bite has caught on here recently. Getting 1-3 bites an evening, nice sizes around 20-25"






Had been outfished by a "clown" color crank several times so I added the color to the arsenal. Very happy with it.

Your gold flashy zander look prettier than our walleye, and better fed than the ones I WAS getting in the Spring. Do they fight good?

What are your favorite recipes or styles of preparation for the table?

Nope. Only on rare occasions do they make a run, they usually just shake their head or buckle a bit from left to right. Even the 35" monster took nothing but a tight line and 2 min or so to get netted. Next to plaice they`re one of my favorite eating fish, though. I got into the habit of scaling them on the spot and fry the filets on the skin with just a little garlic and rosemary.
To be exact, I am planning to keep the tail sections for such stir frying and use the thicker front half for some asian style deep frying stuff. Many cold winters ago I lived a few months in Singapore and was very enthusiastic about the food there. So I went into a book store and brought home an authentic seefood cookbook - or what I thought would be one...  Anyway, many recepies yet to be tried out!

Zander night bite is in full swing. 3-7 contacts an evening. Yesterday I tried a dark variant with a #5 salmon tube double hook and limited in less than 2 hours: 62, 65 and 54cm. Als three bites safely landet on light tackle. I was thinking singles for penetration but we`ve had several nights now with fish only pushing the lure, barely touching it, asking for beaked 3-d-grip so to speak. The double hook penetrated very well even in the boney upper jaw. Below the crank that gave the idea for the color.

This new color is the bomb! Friday only two fish but since my fishing buddy and everybody else in sight blanked it wasn`t the best bite to begin with I assume. Yesterday 60, 62 and 71 cm (24-28") within 20 min. Later in the evening a barely legal one and a failed hookset on an accidentally bluntened hookpoint.

My fishing buddy, a far more experienced VMC team angler who had a bunch of new high end crankbait samples to test, got only one bite around 60cm.





I tried to make a film with an action cam around my chest. Unfortunately, the headlamp alone was too weak for filming but at the same time too irritating to the fish. I got two good fish within a few casts, tryed for 10min with light on, switched it off again and got the 28"er with the very next cast.

You are killing them, that last one is a beautiful fish. I need to find some larger under spin heads like that to play with.

I have been out myself chasing the walleye after dark also. It is that time of year. All smaller fish so far (17"-22") but have seen some larger fish cruising the shore in the last few trips. So far, 5 keeper fish for the fall season along with a several throw backs.... happily filling the void in my freezer. I have gotten a few on big bodied hair jigs but most have been coming on 4" to 5" plastic swimbaits on light heads. Last trip out I caught 4 fish and each one was caught on a different lure. 1/hairjig, 1/swimbait, 1/shallow crankbait, 1/deep crankbait They are all over the water column right now.

Thanks! The freezer is filling, all the fish seem to bite in november this year. Just had a good fill of flatfish, my favorite,  on monday... I only harvest 1-2 medium sized fish any more.  Felt good to let that one go.

With all the fishing pressure in your area it sure can´t hurt to offer a hairbait for a change. I wouldn´t go without a stinger though. Its really weird how they inhale the jig on daylight but sometimes just barely touch it at night.

If you have a pattern that works in the upper water column, I would be very intersted to see it.

Great jigs and awesome catches. :t-up:
[font="Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,sans-serif]Save[/font]

Most of my patterns for walleye are fat and fluffy combinations of craft fur, rabbit zonkers and cotton batting to fill them out. I mostly fish them as bottom scrapers trying to keep occasional contact with the bottom. Tend to use those a lot more often when there is a big bright moon. I think that pushes them down deeper with the bright moon. If the fish are high up in the water, i tend to throw more shallow diving suspending crankbaits. Rapala and Smithwick brands.

I do like your idea with those spinners. I made something similar but had to attach a spinner arm to a jig hook shank. Those bigger ponyhead/horsehead styles would make things much easier.

I will be re-stocking my box soon so hopefully have some pictures to post.

Can`t wait!

You wrote earlier that the bigger wallies seem to stay a bit deeper. I`m not under that impression with zander, but darker lures that cast their silhouette deeper into the water seem to get me bigger fisch.

You or somebody else also wrote that the bite goes on until ice builds up. Last season was my first, so i fished enthusiatically into the winter and noticed a sharp drop in bites around mid december. Can´t put my finger on a certain temperatur or so, it just switched from 3 fish per 1 angler to the opposoite, 3 blokes fishing all evening getting only 1 fish, and remained like that until end of season (march).

Daylight fishing also slowed down a bit with falling temperatures but by far not as significantly as the night bite. Now I wonder if we made a mistake limiting our night fishing to the upper part of the water column...

Zander night bite is back in full swing over here. Last two weeks brought two skunked nights but mostly very productive fishing with 4-6 fish in 2 hours or so. Many of them over 60cm (23"). I still sell other colors than "nitghtmare" black/purple for daylight fishing for northern pike etc. but don`t fish anything else any more. Its very consistent.

I wondered if the night bite had started for you yet.  Glad you are finding some.  Those 60cm fish are perfect eating size.  I've only been out 3 times now after dark and my only results were a single catfish and a broken fishing rod.  Somehow i hooked an eye on a broken rod someone had thrown in the water.  Felt the strange bump on my rod and set the hook.  It must have bounced off the rip rap under water the whole way in.  Had me convinced i had a fish.  haha  Even to the point that i had my net out and light on trying to spot my fish.  Felt pretty silly once i saw my catch.  The water temps over here need to come down a little more i think.

That black/purple color selection is one of my favorites too.  I've started to use a lot of brightly colored heads with darker bodies here recently...... they seem to work good as well.

Pictures seem to show red/orange head and pink tails/blades? Consistent seasonal zander bite sure is better than walleye uncertainty here, which nite bite has been declining here since I first started fishing them in 2016. Last (accidental) decent one I got was 25" daytime on a tiny trout jig.

The few nite bite wallys incidental to targeting wipers this year have hit troos PB boot tails.

Hahaha, broken rods fight pretty good, do they?

Here`s a decent pic of the jig. Its pink, black, glow eyes and pearl blade sticker. My friend had one of his biggest zander 80+cm on a 2" plastic grub this summer, weird bite. I blanked sa + su before I learned the canal is under maintanance this week, they are flushing the banks with a special ship. The stained water kills night fishing. Time to do my taxes and wait for calm weather. Water is relatively warm here, too. They actually pull of a fight, one has to keep a smooth drag. Note the tail bushels of bucktail to taper the profile and keep the hook in place.