Rake the swim by all means but think on this, GM and I fished a water where we use to do this by making tracks in the weed using a boat and very large rakes, as did all the other members. What we found was the tench soon got wise to this and started to avoid the area. I and another member actually saw the tench on several occasions take flight when they came to an open patch where it had been raked.
I subsequently stopped raking one of the swims I fished and used the weed to my advantage. There were several types of weed that grew in this water, a blanket weed that grew up to a foot off the bottom, and two species (water milfoil & curly pondweed) that at times reached the surface. The latter two not being too dense until July, after which time the swim did get very thick with them. But that didn’t matter as I moved off to another water breaming instead of tenching.
As we had the use of boats on this water, I would bait direct over the swim with corn and maggots by hand, liberally sprinkling the whole area. The corn settled nicely on top of the blanket weed some would disappear through it but that wasn’t a problem, because tench root, and root hard through the weed and into the bottom sediment for bloodworm, other surface and subsurface invertebrates.
Some of the maggots would settle on the milfoil and pondweed 2-3 foot off the bottom. Again this wasn’t a problem it was an advantage, as the maggots would wriggle and fall down the plant stems until they eventually settled out on the blanket weed. In effect, what was happening was, the swim was being drip feed for several hours with maggots after baiting.
If you can’t use a boat on your water, search the achieves for an article of mine called Gadgets from the House of Gadget. The mega feeder will do the same job as you can do with a boat it just takes a lot longer.
I caught fish from this swim pretty consistently which was considered by other members to be a nursery swim with smaller fish present than could be caught elsewhere on the water
My best catch weight wise from this “nursery swim,” was three fish 8.7, 9.3 and a very small baby of 5.2. Never did get into the parents of the two former nursery fish though! That really would have been a story and a half!!!!