Tench mecca Sywell Res
Sywell Reservoir offered prolific specimen tinca fishing in unspoilt surroundings
TAKE a look at the catch pages of Angling Times over the past few years and you’d be forgiven for thinking that big tench are ten-a-penny.
Each season countless double-figure fish are reported from a huge swathe of venues, but the picture was vastly different back in the 1980s.
By the start of that decade, only one fish over the 10lb mark had ever been authenticated. The reality was that if the top specimen anglers of the day banked a couple of seven and eight-pounders, from anywhere, they were doing well, and the number of waters holding such fish were far from common.
THE REVELATION
One venue that had gone under the radar up until that point was Sywell Reservoir in Northants. Opened in 1906 to supply water for Rushden and Higham Ferrers, this 67-acre reservoir had been fished by a band of hardened tench fanatics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, producing fish to over 7lb – an unbelievable stamp for the period when you consider that Dick Walker’s best-ever tench in his lifetime weighed 5lb 14oz!
Despite this, it had yet to pique the interest of most of the country’s big-fish anglers, but one man who cottoned on to Sywell’s potential early on was seasoned specialist Alan Rawden. Despite now being in his seventies, he still targets big tench each season and boasts an impressive PB of 11lb 5oz.
He well remembers his first impression when he walked up to the water’s edge for the first time in 1984. “It was pastoral England at its best, with a quiet and undisturbed air about it. I went for a look around, saw some fish roll, then raced to the local village store to buy a ticket!
“A few hours later I was back in the same spot, baited up with groundbait and maggots and cast two feeders over the top. I was clipping the bobbin on the second rod when the first was away – a male of 5lb 9oz – which back then was the largest male tench I’d ever caught.”
That session, which came at the end of the summer, resulted in four more fish of similar size, and was enough for Alan to begin planning a proper campaign for the next summer.
PRESSURE BUILDS…
In late June 1985 he was back at Sywell, and the action wasn’t long in coming. By lunchtime he had banked eight tench to a best of 7lb 10oz.
“I’d caught more big tench in a few hours than I had in the previous 30 years,” he joked. “It was fantastic fishing and I virtually had all of this incredible water, which was full of big tench, to myself – I couldn’t believe my luck.”
That session continued to get even better for Alan, with a tally of 28 fish to 8lb 3oz, and the very next trip produced an even bigger haul of 40 tench. It was a trend that would continue over the next few years.
He said: “On one trip I had 10 tench over 7lb in a session, which as far as I know had never
been done before. It would be like catching 10 chub of 7lb in a day on the river these days! That’s how good it was. Stupidly, I put the catch in Angling Times and it was then that the angling pressure on the water really took off.”
By the late 1980s the cat was out of the bag as an everincreasing number of anglers began to capitalise on the venue’s remarkable form. Some of the country’s top anglers visited, including TV star John Wilson, who filmed an episode of Go Fishing there. Terry Lampard also fished Sywell, but despite the added pressure, Alan continued to fish the water, choosing to grin and bear it.
“At times the race for swims was like the 1849 California Gold Rush. There was all manner of stroke-pulling to get the best swims each morning, as night fishing was banned,” he said.
Over the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s Alan returned to Sywell periodically, managing to raise his PB steadily and culminating in a fish of 9lb 4oz in 1998. By then other waters had started to catch his eye, but he still looks back fondly on that remarkable period when Sywell was still relatively unknown.
“It was a ridiculously prolific water, and at times the fish could be so easy to catch. Now I sometimes struggle to catch 20 tench in a season. Tench fishing in the 21st Century is much harder than those halcyon early days at Sywell!”
Nothing lasts forever, though, and while the venue produced some truly big fish following the turn of the millennium, the fishing declined, and anglers began to go elsewhere.
However, its future is now much brighter following a number of recent stockings. So, who knows what the future might hold once again for this one-time jewel in the nation’s tench fishing crown?
“I’d caught more big tench in a few hours than I had in the previous 30 years. It was fantastic fishing”