Dave Coster's How To- Catch Autumn Tench

This entry was posted on 1st October, 2019

Tench are often thought of as an early summer species, but if you use the right tactics and the weather stays reasonably mild, you can still catch these fish deep into the autumn. However, baits that were successful during those balmy summer days like sweetcorn, mini boilies, pellets and wafters, don’t tend to work so well at this time of the year. The tench have seen it all and are less inclined to hoover up big beds of grub. You have to almost tease them into feeding and all you need to do this is a bag of groundbait and a few pellets. Krill flavoured products are perfect.



Tench tend to patrol deeper margins as the water turns a bit colder, so an ideal way of presenting a hook bait with pinpoint accuracy is with a strong margin pole, although a long float rod will do a similar good job. A basic rig works best: a pole float with a long sight tip and bulked weights set 14inches above a big number 10 or 12 hook, using strong 0.16mm or 0.18mm trace line. The only bait that needs to go on the hook is paste made from groundbait, which in this case is red krill. The groundbait needs to be roughly wetted and stirred, deliberately making it a bit lumpy.



The reason a margin pole can be so effective is you can cup in loose groundbait and a few pellets inch perfectly, then drop a good helping of similar paste right over the top. It’s a good idea to fit a small paste pot to your pole, set back a fair way from the tip, so soft paste can be shipped out well clear of the water before being tipped out and accurately dropped over your feed area. When fishing paste for tench, you don’t need to put a lot of bait in, maybe a couple of good helpings of soft groundbait and just a smattering of similar colour and flavour pellets to get the fish interested.



Many of the venues tench inhabit are full of nuisance rudd, but when using such big hook baits and bulked shot, you normally only get troubled for a few minutes, just after feeding the swim. Eventually the small fish lose interest and drift off, so give it a good hour before feeding again. If you are using a rod and reel set up, it’s okay to feed groundbait by hand, but you will need to mix it stiffer and ball it in. By having your pole float rig set at exact depth the big dollop of soft paste on your hook will pull the float’s tip down slightly, so if the bait comes adrift, the float will let you know by rising up.