2022 - the numbers!
Unfortunately, I won't remember 2022 as the most successful year ever. It was a lot of hard work and especially the long dry summer, during which there was a complete lack of current for weeks, asked for creativity and perseverance. Not only from myself, but also from my guests. Except for a few months were the perch difficult to catch and the pike have completely failed all year. Fortunately, there are still the zander! These beautiful predatory fish, also thanks to the livescope (especially this summer), saved the season. As a result, 2022 is almost the same as 2021 in terms of the total number of fish caught and the number of fishing days. The distribution is just a little different. I compared the numbers of 2022 against those of 2021 and 2020. What is especially striking when you see the totals... what an incredibly good year 2020 was in hindsight.
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223 pike
Even less pike in 2022 than in 2021. Until June it was almost the same as last year (although only March was really good), but after that I really had to look for them with a magnifying glass. The cuttings where I normally catch them: empty! Not sometimes or for a while, but just constantly. Almost all pike that have been caught from July to December have been caught during the walleye. On the other hand, the pike we caught with the zander were almost without exception large. Of the pike caught, 17% were larger than 90 cm and almost 10% of the pike caught were 100 cm+.
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1,087 zander
And thank goodness there are still zander swimming around on the Hollands Diep. Can be caught all year round, even when it is sweltering hot and there is no current for weeks due to the drought. Okay, to be able to catch them in the absence of current, we did need the live scope, but it is for a reaon that we invested in sonar equipment. And the last two months of the year the famous Long line jigging came into play again to get them on board, but anyway, without zander, 2022 would have been downright dramatic. The size of the fish was not above average good or bad. Most fish are in the 55 - 65 cm category. The chance of hooking a zander of 70+ was about 3% and the chance of a fish going over the magic 80 was less than 1%.
292 perch
Less than 300 perchin the boat in 2022. We had to make do with 3 good months: May, September and October. Only in those months did it pay off to target perch with over 60 perch in the boat as a result. Well, all that, then again. Fish under 40 cm could be counted on one hand again. If a perch came on board, the chance that it was larger than 42 cm was a whopping 33%. And the chance that our spiny friend was larger than 45 cm was 13%. But at the 48 cm it got stuck a bit; a few fish were even bigger but that was rare. The weight, on the other hand! So many fish of 2 kilos and over. Not normal.
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The final verdictā
2022 brought 1,635 fish on board: pike, zander, perch, asp, ide, flounder, sea bass and a horse mackerel. Notable absent: catfish. Only twice a catfish was hooked for a short time, which also managed to get rid of the hook relatively quickly. More than 66% of the fish caught was zander. No fewer than 85 times there was a Grand Slam (pike, pike-perch and perch) on board and 40 times we had a Trophy fish on board,which means that 2.5% of the catches involved a fish that went over a magical limit.
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Biggest fish of 2022
Largest pike: 116 cm
Largest zander: 88 cm
Largest perch: 49.5 cm
223 pike
116 cm