It’s been a frustrating season’s tench fishing with bites hard to come by for nearly everyone on the lake I’ve been fishing. I decided to have one last attempt to catch a few tincas before the prospect of barbel drew me back to the rivers.

The previous trip I’d fished for four days for one bite so I wasn’t exactly bursting with confidence. I felt it was more due to the conditions than anything I was doing wrong as three other anglers fishing at the same time had but one tench between them.

My first choice of swim was occupied so I opted for a point which has a few clear gravel patches in front of it but was in the teeth of a strong breeze which was forecast to get stronger over the next 3 days. I baited two areas, one straight out in front of me at 60 yards and a closer one to my right at about 40 yards. Bait included plenty of dead maggots, Hemp and Hali crush and a bag of 2mm Fin Perfect pellets. I put two feeder rods on the 60 yard mark and one on the near mark. Hook-bait was hair-rigged red maggots flavoured with Sonubaits Scopex liquid.

Next morning I was awoken by a screaming run and had to go out on the boat to net a heavily weeded 7lb 9oz female tench. The rest of the morning was quiet and I was getting a lot of weed back on the hair-rigged maggot hook-bait so decided to put a rake through the swim. First drag it came back covered with weed containing lots of maggots and pellets and a quick drag soon became an hour’s dragging to clear the candyfloss type weed and hopefully improve the bait presentation. I left the near mark un-touched but decided to fish a bait on a short hooklength of about 2.5 inches popped up straight off the feeder.

Not surprisingly given the commotion, the afternoon was quiet but out of the blue at 9pm I had a one-noter and was into a carp. I jumped into the boat and surprised myself when I got a lovely linear mirror in the net within a couple of minutes. On the bank it weighed 25lb 4oz. I re-baited the swim after taking photos and not long after dark I had an 11lb 12oz bream on Korum rubber corn. It was a rather ugly fish I recognised from a previous capture due to a lot of warts on the tail end of its flank.

In the morning the tench finally arrived and through the day I had about 10 fish. They came steadily through the day, the best being a lovely deep spawned out fish of 9lb 2oz and two 8lbers. By late afternoon the wind was so strong I had to take the feeders off as the wind was catching them and making accurate casting impossible. I replaced them with a 2 ½ oz lead and PVA bags of maggots to enable me to cast accurately onto the small gravel area I was fishing. When using maggots in PVA bags a good tip is to put a few micro pellets in so that you can hook the bag by the pellets. This stops you accidentally nicking a maggot which causes the PVA to melt! The Korum PVA is far and away the best as the funnel opening makes filling easy and the bump on the end of the tube stops the PVA coming off in an uncontrolled manner.

In the early evening I was just in the middle of barbequing when once again a rod on the far mark tore off taking about 20 yards of line on its first run before stopping in weed. I got into the boat and half pulled and half paddled myself out and then proceeded to battle both the fish and the wind for a good 20 minutes. Normally you can pull yourself to the fish but with a very strong wind the boat was being blown away and I had to keep paddling with one hand to keep near the fish which repeatedly ploughed into thick weed. Thankfully the Size 10 S3 hook and 10lb Korum line held firm and I managed to net my second carp of the trip on tench tackle, a pleasing result as most of the carp anglers on the water would be pleased with two fish in a session! Another mirror, this one weighed 24lb 4oz.

On the final morning I had a final tench of 8lb 6oz to end a cracking session. At the moment my time is limited so that’s probably it for the tench for the time being.  I might target the carp later in the summer and no doubt will end up catching tench!