How a bit of puzzling makes your day

The start was hard, as we had expected. It was the middle of the day and two days before it had not been wild either, so I expected we would have to get it done in the evening. Even so we got a quick bite on several small spots, but that was all each one gave. Early on we fished mainly with chatterbaits, but apart from a small zander and one good follower they did not produce much.

Besides fishing in and around the weed we also worked stone edges and groynes. You can run a crankbait nicely along those, and that soon produced takes for Mark. He was fishing a crank with a less violent action than mine, and after three bites for Mark and none for me we had it worked out: noisy lures were not wanted today.

I switched to a pulsetail trout, a lure that can be terribly underrated and is in my view unfairly less popular. This lure can be genuinely magical when nothing else works, because you cannot imitate a baitfish much more naturally. Mark switched back to a chatterbait for a moment, purely to check whether our theory held. Evening was coming on and the fish might have loosened up. It stayed quiet, so I handed Mark a shad of barely 10 cm and told him to simply cast it out and wind it back through the weed. First cast it was on, and now we knew for certain that subtle was the answer today.

I missed a good fish on the pulsetail and switched to a shad as well. Several more takes followed, among them a very good zander for Mark that came for his shad right in front of the boat, and I dropped a submarine of a pike that had a go at my small lure.

The end of the evening came into view and we had rather worked through the spots within our reach. We decided to vertical jig with a big shad, fishing straight down under the boat with the rod low, to try for one more thick zander. We got no further than a few lookers, and I started to pack up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a good return come off the bottom very fast, much faster than the fish before it. Without hesitation it hammered Mark's shad, and after a good fight an extremely healthy and beautifully colored zander came up. Mark's personal best stood at 77 cm and this one came close, but a quick measure put this lovely fish 2 cm short.

Fish feed in windows, and on a day like this it takes hours to work out which window you need. That is why a full day is more often the right choice than a half.