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.....