Six steps to your best ever tench
There’s no better time than now to grab your biggest tench. With water temperatures rising rapidly, big tinca's will be feeding heavily in preparation for their annual spawning.Gravel pits and estate lakes are great venues to try and break your tench pb this summer.
Drennan and Sonubaits-backed Simon Ashton has been making the headlines recently for catching some superb big tench from gravel pits at Oxfordshire’s Linear Fisheries. Here are his six steps to beating your PB...
Even when you’re fishing at range you can still rake a small weedy area out, and this will encourage inquisitive tench to come and investigate. You can buy small castable weed rakes from your local tackle shops. Tie one to your spod rod, clip up to the distance you want to fish at and then you can spod out using the same rod if you wish.
This sounds like it goes against everything top anglers will tell you, but when I Spomb out I like to create a fairly wide area of bait so that if my hookbait falls slightly short I will still be on some bait. To make this possible I step back a yard after every cast I make.
After you’ve decided what distance to fish by casting to your marker float or using measuring sticks, tie a bit of marker gum to your mainline around three rod rings away from your reel. It allows you to clip up more easily when recasting to the same spot.
I’ve been catching a lot of tench to over 9lb by hair-rigging pieces of worm on to the hook using a bait bayonet. You can either use a few pieces of a dendrobaena worm or half a lobworm – tench absolutely love them. Tie a bayonet on to a small hair rig and thread it through the sections of your broken-up worm using a bayonet needle.
Very few specimen anglers do this, and I’m not sure why. As any matchman will tell you, tench love chopped worms. I add it to my Spomb mix with hemp and pellets, and use it in my feeder too.
I like to add Sonubaits F1 Pellet flavouring to my pellets for the feeder, while I use Sonubaits 24/7 oil in my spod mix. Carp anglers have been raving about this flavouring for a long while now and they catch big tench and bream all the time by accident, so it stands to reason it will work.
