How to catch tench all day long on lakes
Angling Times reporter Ian Jones’ top tricks for a spring tench haul
TENCH FISHING on big lakes and pits can be a tough game to play, but adopting a careful feeding regime and you can catch them all day long... as I have been!
Over the last two years I’ve found tench are not too dissimilar to bream in their feeding habits and will happily mop up a big carpet of bait.
However, it’s the way you prepare and present the free offerings that will help you catch consistently.
PARTICLE POWER
To keep fish in the swim you do need to feed a lot of bait, but not so much that you overfeed them.
On a typical day session I’ll take around 8kg but all of it is particle-based. In a standard bait bucket I’ll mix together hemp, micro-pellets, sweetcorn, dead maggots, casters and a quarterkilo bag of groundbait mixed with various liquid flavourings. This concoction may seem heavy but there’s nothing big in there that will overfeed the fish.
You could quite easily put large pellets and boilies into your mix and still catch, but after a short time your quarry would be full.
Instead, introduce a quantity of small baits that will keep the tench rooting around without filling them up.
At the start of the session I’ll introduce 12 medium Spombs of this particle mix into my swim and fish two Method feeders over the top. These will be accurately placed on the outer ring of the feed zone (one to the left and one
“After finding a weed-free area I clip up all three rods to the exact same distance”
to the right) so passing fish are intercepted before they can reach the bulk of the feed.
METHOD TO SUCCESS
The Method mix I use is simply made from a sweet fishmeal groundbait with dampened micro pellets and corn mixed in.
My hookbait choice is a fake buoyant grain of corn on one rod and a bunch of fake, buoyant maggots on the other.
These hookbaits not only match the feed in my particle mix, but they stand proud of it to keep the hook from being masked by any silt or weed.
In terms of Method feeder size I use a medium Drennan 25g pattern, as this holds just enough feed to draw the tench to your hookbait.
After each tench caught I introduce two additional Spombs of particle mix back into the swim to rejuvenate it.
The tench will be spooked, but they won’t venture far from the area, and this additional feed provides that small boost that
makes all the difference.
Repeat this feeding regime after each tench and I guarantee you the fish will come back time and time again!
HITTING THE MARK
In most areas of specimen-style fishing it’s very important to clip up accurately. Using measuring sticks is the best way to do this.
After finding a weed-free area in the swim that I’m happy to fish over, I clip up both rods, and the spod rod, to the exact same distance so that I know my hookbaits will be presented amid a bed of feed.
On big waters it’s your job to draw the fish to you, and with two hookbaits offered over a tight area of food your chance of bagging big time is greatly enhanced.
To understand the distance you’re fishing at you should set your measuring sticks at the length of your spod rod. In this case the rod I’m using is 12ft long, so if I want to fish at a distance of 60ft I know that I’d have to use five wraps of the measuring sticks.