For just all around fun fishing, catching bream is hard to beat. Bream are the most plentiful fish in the lake and they are easy to catch. There is a drawback, however — most of the time they are fairly small, about hand size. On the other hand, they have a sort of sweet taste and are very fried whole.
“Bream” is a term used in the South to include about half a dozen members of the sunfish family, such as bluegills, shellcrackers, red eared sunfish, warmouth bream, coppernose bream and several other fish in this family.
They are all very social fish and usually if you catch one there will be plenty more nearby. They are also the most colorful fish in the lake.
They can be caught on a fly rod or on small spinners or jigs, but the most popular way to catch them is with a No. 6 or No. 8 hook, a small weight and a live worm or cricket. Some people use a small float; others just fish on the bottom.
When bream spawn or are “on the bed,” anywhere from 20 to as many as several hundred can be in one small area. They pair off and make little craters in the lake bottom, where they lay their eggs.
These craters are about as big as a saucer and they will be almost touching each other in large groups. If you put a bait in this crater they will eat it immediately, causing some very fast fishing action.
Bream will bed every month from March until about September, usually around the full moon or new moon. They will bed on shallow points, humps, old road beds, or in the back of pockets in about one to six feet of water.
Rivers and backwater lakes have plenty of bream, but my experience has shown the bigger bream come from ponds, small lakes and especially watershed lakes.
There are several ways to locate a bream bed. You can actually smell a bream bed if you get close to it. There will be a strong, musty, fish smell in the area of the beds if the wind is not blowing much.
If you detect this smell just cast a cricket around in the area until you catch one, then anchor the boat and start fishing. Sometimes you may see a large light colored spot on the lake bottom in shallow water. This may be where the bream have cleared out the moss to make a bed.
My favorite way to catch big bream is fishing down the bank in my favorite pond with a 1/16-ounce jig head, slider crappie jig, four-pound test line and a nice limber crappie rod. June bug or black with a chartreuse tail is my favorite color. Believe me, if you catch a bream that can eat a crappie jig, it will be a nice one.
Bream are generally considered to be small fish, but there are many lakes and ponds in our area that produce bream weighing a pound or more every year.
Many people don’t know this, but bream have a medicinal property that the medical community is just finding out about. It has been proven that a nice relaxing afternoon of bream fishing can actually lower your blood pressure at least 10 points.
Just try it.
