Project Tinca

 

I can still remember my first ever tench. Fishing intentionally for tench with a brown crumb filled open feeder and sweetcorn hookbait on my local club lake on an after school evening aged 14, the Fairy Liquid bottle-top shot up to the Milbro rod's glass fibre butt and a brief tussle resulted in the capture of a lovely olive flanked tench of somewhere around three pound in weight. The following years saw me embark on a tench fishing apprenticeship that resulted in me catch my favourite quarry on float, feeder and on the then still "new fangled" tactic of bolt rig and boilie, with Richworth Salmon Supreme boilies proving the favourite of the club lake tench. As the 1980's drew to a close I caught what remains my biggest ever tench, a fish that weighed just over five pounds, and have barely fished for them since ...... until now. 

That's not to say that I haven't caught any tench in the following decades, but these have been chance encounters while engaging in general float fishing, often while using traditional split cane rods and centre pin reels. The tench captured have ranged from tiny, slippery "bars of soap" (there are few fish sweeter looking than a small tench of four to six ounces) to respectable fish of two or three pounds that put a pleasing bend in the cane and gave a good account of themselves, but none have been intentionally targetted or sought after.

However, all of that looks set to change. While my winters spent in pursuit of perch are a pretty standard permanent feature, I'm always conscious of a slight sense of aimlessness in my summer fishing. That's not to suggest that I don't enjoy fishing in the warmer months or that I fail to concentrate sufficiently while doing so, but there is rarely an ongoing deliberate focus that sees me through the whole summer. I flit from water to water and from species to species as I wait for the temperature to drop, the days to shorten and my perch obsession to resume. 

The reason for the change is that I've just joined a very small club of less than thirty members who have have access to and run a small, wild and mostly untamed lake hidden in a lovely corner of rural England. The lake's environs are far less supressed and domesticated than the sanitised commercial fisheries that dominate the modern UK angling scene, and its lightly managed state forms a large part of its attraction.

But beyond the attractiveness of a lake unsullied by onsite cafes and tackle shops is the prospect of what lives and swims in its depths. In addition to the ubiquitous small roach and rudd and the perch who feed on them, the pool is inhabited by a good head of tench and genuine English crucian carp, many of the latter sourced from the private breeding ponds of the country's foremost crucian expert and enthusiast, a now nanogenearian former English teacher and author. I have no expectation that either the tench or the crucians will prove easy to catch. Neither is dependant on angler's bait as a primary food source, and crucians in particular are notoriously finicky, but the liklihood that each noteable fish caught will have been hard earned makes the anticipation of fishing for them all the more seductive. I supect that this is a lake destined to "get under my skin" and to provide a puzzle that even though it may turn out to have the beating of me, will be engrossing and fun to engage with. I love a project..... 

Farm pond carping

I can't remember if I read it or heard it or even where I read or heard it, but the phrase has stayed with me: "The English countryside is less a place than an idea." Whoever it was who first made the observation is, in my opinion, bang on the money. Not just an idea but an ideal, and within the ideal lies, for me, another ideal, that of the farm pond. Of all the places that it's possible to catch carp, my favourite, is a genuine farm pond on a working farm. The carp don't have to be big (in such venues they rarely are- a double is still a big fish and a mid double a monster) but there's something almost magical about a small body of water full of carp that are the progeny of their forefathers who were first stocked into their agrarian setting years ago in simpler times. It was to such a pond that my son and I set off for today, for a few hours of mid- April carp bothering activity.

We were accompanied by a friend of my son's who had never previously been fishing, and so the pond we selected was chosen not only for its pleasing surroundings, but also because the carp of this particular lake are notably fecund, and many years of succesful spawning have not led (as they probably should have done) to the farmer thinning out the stocks, and so the fish exist in the lake in permanently hungry abundance, with the result that we could almost guarantee that his angling duck would be broken several times over during the course of a short morning session.

We opted to fish two rods between the three of us to ensure that there always be one of either myself or my son able to act as coach-cum-ghillie for his pal. One rod was fished on the Method, with the other a lighter set-up utilising a 3BB porcupine quill float and a centre-pin reel. The conditions were challenging while the fishing, as anticipated, was not. The wind howled and whistled and whipped accross the pond, but the three of us were soon steadily catching, and by the time we decided to call stumps, we had probably brought something in the region of forty carp to the bank. Sweetcorn had proved the fish's downfall on the float, while a small hair-rigged Robin Red pellet had brought success on the Method.

In all honesty, the fishing on the pond is, although compensated for by the attractive setting, too easy to retain the interest for long of an experienced angler, unless he or she is one of those irritating types who insists on counting every fish and shouting out regular updates with each one landed. "Fifty four, fifty five .... oooh that's number fifty six", the self-aggrandising and voluble angler sadly unaware that no-one else is in the remotest bit interested in their accumulating tally. 

We retreated to the welcome warmth of the car, and although I suspect we have failed to recruit my son's friend to the regular "brotherhood of the angle" (otherwise known as the ranks of the addicted) all three of us had enjoyed a peaceful and pleasurable morning in a quintessentially English pastoral environment, and in our modern world of loudly competing voices, volatile echo chambers, and tensions between nations, such peace is to be prized.  

 

Mediocrity is my middle name

The title of this piece is somewhat misleading. My actual middle name is Murray (which isn't much better!), but my angling results at the moment hover perilously between the categories of mediocre and disappointing. After several years of relative success, especially with specimen sized perch, 2024 saw a downturn in my fortunes with no fish of noteable size of any species banked, and so far 2025 seems determined to prolong the run of piscatorial underacheivement. The irony, though, is that last year was one of my most enjoyable seasons for quite some time, largely because almost all of my sessions were fished in the company of my son, or with some of the good friends who I've collected over the course of my angling years, or both. 

Today's expedition, a few snatched hours on an early April morning, saw me once again fail to set the angling world ablaze with my escapades, as my friend David and I visited a local lake. I arrived before David and had my first carp on the bank just twenty minutes after making my first cast and before his arrival. I had decided, on a whim, to eschew my normal centre pin and quill float approach, in favour of a Method feeder, with a 2 pound test curve rod, freespool reel and bite alarm. Some regular readers may now be throwing their hands up in horror and recoiling at such wanton backsliding into "traditional angling" heresy, but there are times when a solid screaming tone on the alarms and a rod jerking and bending as the fish tears off feels like exactly what I need, besides which I consider laziness, in moderation, as much a virtue as a flaw. 

Shortly after landing that first carp, a second tore off with my hair rigged Robin Red pellet in its mouth, only for the hook to pull as I drew it towards the net. However, with one fish banked and another hooked and almost landed and less than half an hour gone, I felt confident that the morning would go on to provide a steady procession of fish to the unhooking mat. It didn't. 

David arrived and set up in the swim next to me, which enabled us to pass the time chatting and catching up with each other's news and lives, which in the event was no bad thing in light of the absence of anything much in the way of angling action!

I added a second fish, a surprise barbel, before David eventually got off the mark with an F1. I am no fan of barbel, coarse fishing's monarch of moving water, being stocked in lakes and ponds but the fish gave a spirited fight and was a welcome diversion  from inactivity.

Although the Spring sun was bright in the sky, a chill Easterly wind kept the temperature down and the  other anglers around the lake (of which there were more than is normal for this pond) were similarly struggling with only the odd fish being landed. My final fish of the morning was a bream, enabling me to console myself with the fact that what I'd lacked in numbers had been compensated for by variety. David was less fortunate, his second and final fish completing for him a brace of F1s. 

By lunchtime I was back home with my net drying in the garden and my tackle neatly and safely enconsed in the garage. Perhaps it's an age thing - I am, after all, now a grandfather and rapidly approaching my seventh decade - but these days I find myself measuring success less in relation to size or numbers ("just as well", I hear you say) but, rather, in terms of enjoyment and, fortunately for me, I've enjoyed both of my, mostly fishless, excursions of 2025 to date. As many a bankside sage has informed me: "it's called fishing, not catching" and from such a truism I draw comfort!