Artem Novikov of the MakeShiftLures YouTube channel has been back at his favourite tench water, targeting tench once again with some unusual homemade baits! We’ll let him tell the story…
I wanted to make a lure with mop fibers for a while. When I finally got around to it, summer was in full swing. I was thinking of trying it out for pike or perch but to really test the lure I ended up going to my favorite tench lake. As there is something special to get non predatory fish to bite your freshly made lure.
Me and a friend of mine arrived at the lake around 9am. I did my usual preparations of raking the spot from weeds and feeding it with a ground bait and maggots. As I was thinking all the movement at the bottom will entice tench to bite a moving lure.
After a while I started to see bubbles and shadows moving in the clear spot. Some of them were horizontal, but others were nearly vertical with their heads down in a tail up feeding position. Those feeding fish are the ones that I wanted. By casting it to their direction and retrieving the mop jig with quarter of a reel turn and twitch of the rod bites will usually come after a fall when lure sits on the bottom for a split second and on a next retrieve I will be reeling in to a fish thats already on the hook.
That day I ended up catching 3 tench. With bites being around noon, then about 3pm and final fish around 9pm. Biggest fish was 50cm. A friend of mine was using a conventional feeder method with maggot on the hook, and managed to catch 4 fish that day. So my 3 tench on a lure with a spinning rod didn’t sound too bad!
