It looks like Spring has finally arrived and the sun is beginning to warm my back, the days are getting longer and there is more daylight for fishing. This time of year means one thing to me, tench fishing. This fish has always had a certain magic to me. Back in the sixties when coarse angling was very different than it is now, us kids who used to fish the many gravel pits in the Thames valley caught perch and roach but the “experts” caught tench. The tench had a certain mystery, it fed at night and was much bigger than the roach and perch we caught. Sometimes we would hook one but it usually broke even the heavy tackle we used. Looking back on this tackle I now realise that we used the wrong rods with line that was too heavy for them and it was usually the knots we used that let us down.

The tench has retained this mystery for me and I hope will always have a special place in my memories, even when for a few years I was totally captivated by barbel, I still found time for a couple of tench fishing sessions in the spring.

I think big tench are more difficult to catch than big carp on a regular basis, partly because they have been displaced by carp on so many waters as they do not compete so well for food. I much prefer to catch them on a float in what I consider to be the traditional way, but on some waters angling pressure has driven them out of the margins and I have to resort to a feeder. This was true of my biggest ever tench which I caught last season.

Four nice tench

In the last week or so I have been running some courses for young people and I saw my first tench of the season caught, are your local lakes producing tench yet?

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