This season has been very odd, it's not exactly bad but certainly not good like last year. The zander have been less co-operative than usual but in an odd way. A good day in the summer usually involves visiting say 10 swims, and on a couple of those swims there will usually be multiple fish, say 12 or 15 between the 2 swims, then a few odd fish or two from 3 or 4 of the other swims and then say 4 empty swims. This summer it has been one fish from every swim, it's like pulling teeth. I've had 3 goodish half-hours scattered through the last 10 weeks and the rest has been pure attrition. The rivers have been in reasonable nick to my eye and there's not any obvious clue as to why they have been out of sorts. 

Haven't fished as much as last season but that's mainly down to not wanting to concentrate all day for a handful of fish (I'm getting soft). It does bring home though that this is only my 9th season afloat and I know nothing! It's so easy to slip into a pattern of thinking based on a few years, which may have been exceptionally good and I didn't even realise! 

Is anyone having a bumper time?

Excellent questions.

Wire. If you don't use wire in UK waters you are going to lose a lot of jigs to pike. Will you catch any more zander for doing so? I don't know. I catch plenty of zander (including some big smart ones) using  wire leaders and although I could never prove it I'd bet it doesn't make a jot of difference except perhaps in very occasional exceptional circumstances - say using very light jigs for heavily pressurised (caught many times) zander, not a scenario likely to arise in the UK, or perhaps rather more often for very small (sub-1lb) fish which struggle to take the jig and may feel a problem, although the weight of the jighead is more likely to bother them I suspect, I catch plenty of the little ones on my gear (unfortunately!) with jigs as heavy as 25g. Many missed takes are down to perch and pike, I'm amazed how often a pike will come back and hit a jig 2 or 3 times before it finally gets itself hooked, I usually move off when I feel a pike take. (Get the boat partner over the pike, that's the plan!!!!!)

The US walleye scene is very different from our zander situation, pike are not respected at all and they are usually fishing for a very low average size of fish. I have read a lot of US walleye stuff and I don't think it's very helpful, it's much better to go to European sources The Dutch for instance started with the walleye tactics and rapidly adapted them to suit their own waters and their zander, much larger both on average and at specimen size than the US walleye. My zander luring really took off when I fished in Holland, although it has developed slightly differently from my friend Michel Huigevoort's approach, mainly down to different waters and opportunities. If you were really keen you would learn to read some Dutch, or maybe press your schoolboy French into service, there's a lot of good angling writing on the continent. 

Coloured line. Last year I swapped all my regular PowerPro to Hi-Vis Yellow, not because I'd detect takes any better (I feel takes, not see them) but because sometimes when fishing tight to sunken trees, especially in windy conditions I didn't always feel the line touching a branch and needed to watch the line angle very carefully to avoid snagging, it was definitely worth the trouble and expense for that reason. But there are conditions when the Hi-Vis Yellow is all but invisible, Tim Kelly uses the red colour and there are times when that is much more visible.

The best edge you can get is to buy a St Croix Avid blank/rod (see the jigging article article on my website for the details), if you really want to learn how to jig then you need all the information you can get, using the right rod transforms the experience.  

I tried something different for the same reasons Dave and ended up with a nice mid double pike and a carp about the same size, will not be trying that again......