Feeder Rigs for Tench - Help please......

[Big M]

Hi,

I am new to this forum and am looking for some help/advice on feeder rigs for Tench.
I have been fishing a natural lake with alot of lilies & weed recently and having good sucess on the float for Tench, catching plenty between 3-5lb, however I have not yet had any on the ledger, which is usually cast next to a bed of lilies.
The lake is mainly Tench, Bream, Rudd and a few Carp but it is not fished by carp anglers.
I have tried several rigs without much luck:

• Method feeder - using groundbait - hookbait corn or pellet
• In line maggot feeder - fake maggot or fake caster on the hook
• Helicopter rig with an open ended feeder and a shot fluoro hooklength with - corn, fake maggot/caster on the hook

I get alot of blips on the bite alarms with the bobbins lifting a couple of inches then going back down but no runs that I can hit.
At times the blips drive me crazy, reaching over to the rod only for it to stop then bleep again as soon as you move your hand away but no run.
Am I being pestered by small fish or are the Tench picking up the bait and then dropping it??

Any ideas greatly appreciated

Big M

[Lman]

if there is a lot of weed it may be where the fish are coming through the weed and hitting the line or catching it round fin or tail on there way to the baited area.
I have used back leads in the past to keep the line on the bottom but thats with a clear bottom not sure if it would work with a lot of weed?

[ninja_death]

You could try a running lead rig with a 12" hook length and 10mm cell boilie fished over groundbait, hemp, maggots and corn mix.
Worked for me, I was going for carp but got my first 5.5lb tench on it mid morning on the edge of a reed bed in the margins. Good luck with your tenching.

[BoldBear]

I have had this sort of indication before where the fish have been picking up the feeder trying to get at the feed inside; to find out if this is happening cast with an empty feeder a few times or take the feeder off to see if the false bites stop.

If you find that the fish are attacking the feeder then you can try putting a small rubber band around the feeder and pass a bend of your hook length under the band so that the hook is only an inch or so from the feeder so that when a fish takes your hookbait it will pull the hooklength out from under the band.

Another common thing that happens on bottoms with thick silt is where the Tench are pre-occupied with burrowing into the silt looking for bloodworm and they appear to ignore a hookbait sitting on top of the silt and just nudge it about with the top of their heads as they burrow into the silt.

It can be very frustrating when this happens as you see clouds of Tench bubbles moving all around your float or leger but you don’t get any decent bites; just the odd tug as the Tench bump into your feeder or hookbait.

Or it could just be line bites as Lman has already said.