This is the first in a new series of ‘How to’ posts, written by John Bailey about a variety of angling topics, which we hope you will find useful.  If you try them out and have success, we’d love to hear all about it on our Facebook page!

You can have a swim in front of you bubbling like a cauldron, absolutely full of tench feeding hard but you can still sit there fishless. Why is that?

It’s simply that very often tench do not physically pick a bait up with their lips but just suck it in from an inch or even more above the lake bed. This means that if your bait is too heavy and your hook is too big, it will simply sit there, anchored to the bottom while the tench browse above it.

The answer is to use a reasonably small, light hook but, of course, never going too fragile and jeopardising the safety of the fish. The other route is to use a bait that is either buoyant or at least has neutral buoyancy. This is very often where the plastic imitation baits have such an important role to play.

Now the tench season is upon us, I know that maggots are going to have a very important role to play in my next few weeks of angling. Very probably, I’ll be using size 12 or even 14 hooks for my tench.

On them, I will probably put two plastic maggots and a single real one. Mind you, I’ll experiment a lot. I’ll look at my hook baits in the shallow margins to make sure I like the way they are behaving. Ideally, they’ll just swish and swirl just off the bottom. That way, as a tench comes along and sucks, the bait and the hook will be right up there between the lips.

Keep experimenting. If you’re not getting bites, perhaps take the real maggot off and use three imitations. Sooner or later, you’ll crack the puzzle!