Early Season Tench

with Mark Barrett

                                                                                                  
It’s pretty easy to forget with all the good weather that we have had this spring that it’s actually still very early in the tench season. Although the water has warmed significantly and is way beyond what it normally would be at this stage of the year in a normal year, fish respond just as much to daylight hours and other factors for their habits than just the water temperature.

On the lake that I have been fishing despite the water being extremely warm the fish are still acting the same ways that they did last year in a much cooler spring. The fish are not yet widely spread about but are moving around in large groups, typical pre-spawning behaviour. This does of course leave the possibility of a big hit of fish being on the cards should you be able to get the fish in front of you; however it also can lead to the frustrating situation where the fish are virtually all in front of one or two swims and a few anglers make hay while you struggle. So because of this location is absolutely vital. Take a long hard look before you set up camp for the day/ days as just one swim away can be too far at this time of the year.

The plus side of fishing for tincas in early spring though is that they are feeding hard to get ready for spawning in June or July. Tench fishing once the fish have spawned can be enough to pull your hair out as they will often refuse just about anything that you throw at them, unless you can either use tiny baits or light tackle. At this point in the season though tench will eat just about anything that you care to throw at them and their tastes could be best described as catholic. Personally my favourite baits are red maggots, lobworms, casters, sweetcorn and prawns. The latter three are mainly used for float fishing, whilst corn, but especially maggots and casters are my favourites; in fact I rarely use anything else.
Where you present these baits is of course really important and I believe that often most anglers hamper themselves in this greatly. It’s almost a given that any good tench water, especially gravel pits will be very weedy and to present a bait properly we need to find a clear area don’t we? Well actually my answer would always be no. Clear gravel areas are great from the point of view of making life easy for us, but tench don’t feed there naturally as there naturally wouldn’t be any food present. The type of food that tench feed on will be in the weed as it feels safe there and that’s where the tench will feed naturally and therefore with the greatest confidence. This really is the key as confident fish are easy fish to catch. Therefore what I actually look for is a patch of weed that I can present a bait on and a rig by which to do the same. Starting with the latter first I borrowed an idea from carp fishing to get a rig perfect for fishing into weed. Carp anglers quite commonly use a rig called a chod rig to avoid weed fouling the bait. Now in carp fishing this is usually used in conjunction with a popped up bait, but I don’t like that presentation for tench (though others do). Therefore to make my bait buoyant I wrap it in a piece of pop up dissolving foam, this also helps it not get caught up on the cast with any longer strands of weed. So what is a chod rig? In essence it is a straightforward helicopter rig that instead of having both beads set around the hooklength swivel the top bead is allowed to slide a set length, being stopped by a piece of silicone on the leadcore. This means that when the rig is cast in the hooklength rides back up the leadcore and rather than being pulled into the weed by the blockend feeder it lays down onto the top of the weed when the foam dissolves.

So knowing what rig to use is a major part but you also need to find that area. What I look for is soft weed which is quite fibrous. This will support a rig quite nicely and will be packed with the natural food that tench love. Finding this requires a bit of work with a marker rod, a piece of kit that you should never leave home without. This type of weed will feel very much like silt on the rod top, being slightly clingy, but once you pull the lead free it will slide over the bottom with some resistance. Find this and you really have found the key to catching consistently.

As with hookbaits, what attractant feed you put in is very much up to you and your budget as tench are not fussy. I prefer groundbait wherever I can use it as this leaves a lot of smell in the water without leaving too much for the tench to actually feed on. To this I will add a bit of hemp and pellet as tench love both of these and a bit of corn and dead maggots. Never use live maggots in a groundbait mix as their squirming will break open the balls before you want them to.

Hopefully these few tips will help you put a few extra tench into your net this spring, certainly the warm weather has encouraged the fish to feed. My tenching started off really nicely when I landed a 9lbs 9ozs fish on my very first trip. With much bigger fish present in the water I am hoping that I might just be able to shake my personal best of 11lbs 4ozs. Watch this space!