Trophy Zander on large soft baits

(с)

For a long time the ideology of the Russian jig meant basically catching a zander on rather small lures. This was most likely due to the fact that the accent of the jig fishing was shifted towards coastal fishing. And when fishing from the coast, it is important to get distant from the shore, buoys and ditches. With a strongly sailing large bait to make such a cast (at 60-80 meters) is practically not real.

About 2010 The situation began to change in favor of fishing with boats. The impetus to this was the emergence of several interesting commercial tournaments on fishing from boats with large prize funds and wide coverage of the tournaments themselves in the fishing mass media. Many spinningists then began to seriously think about buying their own boats, and the Russian market began to appear the first decent boats under serious (from 60 l s) motors. I remember well how in the first season of Proanglers League about 80% of participants acted on boats borrowed from the bases hosting the tournament. And from the next season sportsmen began to buy and equip their own boats, and by the season of 2014 in the tournament all participants performed on personal boats. This trend also became a trend in amateur fishing.

With the transition to Jeep fishing from boats, where the distant cast is not as important as from the shore, began to change and approaches to the size of baits. The breakthrough was the articles and videos of Yaroslavl masters in Jig fishing (Vladimir Girbasov, Dmitry Zyuzin, Andrey Chulanova), who promoted the idea of catching a trophy pike perch on lures of large (15-25 centimeters) sizes. With these lures, the Yaroslavl won several commercial competitions to catch the trophy pike.
Large silicone lures have become habitual for the majority of anglers catching predatory fish from boats...

(Typical sizes in 3.5-4.0-4.5 inches on the background "correct " bait in 18 cm)

My experience of catching large soft baits from 15 cm and more is not so great yet. Just the third season as they took the place in my boxes. Basically it is a silicone bait from RELAX and Fox Rage. But for such a short period of time these "Big rubber fishes" brought to us with Dimka a lot of good trophies...

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Today, as a video application, a short story from fishing one of the first anglers who have become systematically catching on large silicone baits - Andrey Chulanova (Yaroslavl).

Several trophy fishes in the frame and a story about the peculiarities of catching a large silicone.

@spinner