Sywell Reservoir
Tench
Tinca Tinca
A hard fighting, distinctive fish with olive green flanks, yellow bellow, red eyes, and large paddle like fins. With two barbules on upper lip.
A common fish in estate lakes, reservoirs, gravel pits, and some slow flowing rivers. It is most common in central and southern England, and in recent years, the tench has grown to enormous sizes in southern gravel pits, and reservoirs.
The Tenchfishers is a small group dedicated to the research, and pursuit of the tench as a species.
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Over the last 40 years, Sywell Reservoir
has been one of the most prolific big tench waters in the country,
which has produced quite literally thousands of big tench to
many anglers who have visited its banks. This
clear weedy reservoir has always been known as a top specimen
venue but has never quite produced tench to a size that will
shake the British record. However, for sheer numbers of specimen
sized  fish,
this 80 acre Northamptonshire venue just has to be the best
specimen tench water in the country!
Today (relativly speaking), Sywell Reservoir
is now in decline, and current catch statistics suggest the
best years in terms of fishing are now in the past, (at least
for the foreseeable future). However I was lucky enough to fish
Sywell for eight years, from 1989 to 1997, when the venue peaked
as a big tench water, and a staggering amount of large tench
were caught during those years, by many anglers.
To be honest, Sywell was always an ‘open
secret’, and by the mid nineties A LOT of anglers were
visiting the place, and many angers were catching big fish.
A week would not go by without at least one angler publishing
HIS catch in the Angling Times, or Anglers Mail, and very soon
Sywell was common knowledge within the angling fraternity, and
angler’s from all over the country were traveling there
to get a ‘slice of the action’.
The fishing at Sywell Reservoir in those days
was very prolific, with multiple catches of 8-10 fish in a day
being the norm, with some anglers, on a good day catching over
100lb of quality specimen tench. These fish were all big, deep
bodied tench of between 6lb-8lb, and the fishing was nearly
always very good!
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