THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

TENCH Tinca tinca
Bucket List status – result
One of the most readily recognisable
coarse fish species, tench are powerful
fish, aided to no small degree by having
such a wide 'wrist' to the tail which itself
is equally wide and well able to generate
a great deal of paddling power.
and tall.
A small scaled fish with both looks and
feels slippery and slimy, with a small but
noticeable barbel at each corner of the
mouth. The dorsal and anal fins also
catch the eye in that they are short based
Colouration too is a major factor, which while it can be quite variable according to location, still greatly
differs from that of its close relatives, ranging from dark green or brown to almost black at times with
a golden sheen on the flanks.
It's also rare to find tench living in running water. Another species we used to induce to spawning
condition in my National Rivers Authority days for re-stocking purposes.
At around the age of twelve, a small group of us used to cycle with our fishing rods fastened to the bike
cross bar from Leyland to Bamber Bridge to fish the now extinct terminal of what I assume was the
Leeds and Liverpool canal.
Known locally as the summit, this was where the canal came to an end in the form of three weedy
prongs, rather like a table fork, which we'd heard were good for bream and tench, two species we rarely
if ever bothered fishing for, but which for some reason we had got into our heads that we wanted to
catch.
I can't remember how many visits we
made, but it wasn't many, and it was
there that I caught my first ever tench.
My only tench in fact until 2011, when
Graeme Pullen and I spent a few days
at Anglers Paradise in Devon after
abandoning a porbeagle shark hunt at
nearby Boscastle due to problems with
the boat.
Each day we would target something
different in the hope of coming away
with a short series of angling video's,
one of which by pure chance turned out
to be fishing for golden tench.
We were sat in a swim on one
Mike Winrow, 11½ pound Tench
particular lake where we could see
fish flashing in the margins close to
the weed fringes quite literally less than a rod length out. Curious to see what they were, Graeme put a
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