POP THEM UP
Three flavoured maggots and a shaped piece of foam are my normal hookbait.
TENCH will often cruise around several feet off the lakebed and cover a lot of ground quickly. If they are in a feeding mood they will drop down to investigate any bait on the bottom.
Normally, I introduce roughly equal quantities of hemp and my chosen hookbait. The hemp is likely to be picked up and blown out by the tench many times over the course of a session. Some will be eaten, but the rest will keep the fish browsing for quite a long time.
The maggots, worms or casters are there to get the tench feeding harder. There’s no need to fill it in. A couple of pints of bait are plenty for a morning session.
One trick that often brings bites much faster than normal is to pop the hookbait up. When fishing maggots this is normally achieved by sandwiching a sliver of rig foam between two or three maggots on the hook.
Rubber casters are naturally buoyant, so use just enough to counteract the weight of the hook. Worms can be injected with air, but I prefer to hair- rig them with a small disc of rig foam to add buoyancy. The foam also acts as a buffer on the cast.
Whether you are fishing a float in the margins, or casting to distant gravel bars with a feeder, using these three baits will prove the key to unlocking gravel pit tench.
Give it a go, you will not be disappointed.