Big bream

[Kappa]

I've been thinking (always a bad sign).

 

I've been watching the Korda underwater videos and the Horseshoe tench are very tricky, frequently 'getting away with it' rejecting and spitting out the baited rig, if they even pick it up in the first place! The swim is absolutely full of tench yet he hardly catches any (compared to number in the swim), the carp on the other hand seem to be less cute and in terms of numbers in the swim more are caught.

 

So I wonder how cute are bream? If they are as cute as tench you could have them in your swim every session but due to the low numbers fail to catch one! I actually think the bream are in peoples swims more regularly than we think but are not caught.

 

What do you all think?

 

Rich

[Anderoo]

The tench in horseshoe do get fished for a lot, and have no doubt seen thousands of carp rigs, so I'm not surprised Danny 'oh my love' Fairbrass had to scale down before he started catching them. I bet he'd fished specifically for the tench (smaller hooks, maggots) he'd have caught more than that. I'm sure fishing that exact rig at Wingham would catch more tench too, just because they're not so pressured. The bream even less so.

 

My gut feeling is that the bream may pass through the swims more frequently than we think, but don't always stop to feed on the bait (for various reasons - it's presented wrong, in the wrong place, too little, too much...etc!). I think if they do stop to feed, and you don't mess it up, you've got a good chance of catching one. I still put rig at the bottom of my priority list. Bolt rigs of various sorts seem to have accounted for most of the recent captures, so that's good enough for me! It certainly makes life (and blanking) easier.

 

As for getting away with it - no idea! I reckon get them feeding and that'll solve the problem.

[lutra]

Bolt rigs of various sorts seem to have accounted for most of the recent captures, so that's good enough for me! It certainly makes life (and blanking) easier.

Makes sense to me to.

 

As for getting away with it - no idea! I reckon get them feeding and that'll solve the problem.

And so does that.

 

One thing that i use a lot and am convinced works well is ground up boillies instead of ground bait. Most of my big bags of bream off the Castle have come from a very small amount of initially baiting up, just a few small spods of ground up boilie with a few casters in is enough to start things off for me.

 

The ground up boilie is a great attractor and bream just love caster which probably wafts up well along with tiny bits of boilie and helps get them interested in getting their heads down to pick up some more ground up boilie and hopefully my boilie, by which time hopefully 1 or 2 more will be following suit with their heads down feeding.

 

In my view ground up boilie is much more appealing as food and much more likely to get their heads down than ground bait. I'm sure different anglers will have different ideas, but its work well for me and i think it seems to compliments my bolt rigged boilie well.

[Stuart Wright]

Hi everyone,

 

Firstly, what a fantastic thread! I've really enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately, I don't have the same experience as many of you when it comes to fishing for specimen Bream, but I did spend last Autumn targeting Bream in one of the more historic 'SB' venues referred to throughout this thread.

 

Although I'm still learning (largely thanks to this thread!), there is one point that has been touched on that I can offer some observations on. I can't remember who, but someone earlier on in the thread mentioned that they didn't put much weight behind the idea of Bream disturbing the lake/pit bottom and subsequently eating the food items left 'wafting' mid-water. Similarly, Lutra mentions this in the previous post.

 

Well, on one particular trip last year when I was fishing off a large point on the venue in question with a friend, we were both fishing over a large (relatively widely dispersed) bed a bait. We were fishing the same area with the same bait and the same rigs (or so we thought), but only he caught. We both found this rather puzzling, so decided to more closely examine our rigs in the margin. It turns out that the artificial corn he was using was actually more boyant than he had anticipated, and not having checked his rig in the margin ( ) he had essentially been fishing a short zig-rig. On the other hand, my bottom bait had stayed on the bottom but had not been picked up.

 

Unfortunately, these were not SB, but an interesting none the less.

 

Keep up the great debating lads - I will be reading with interest!

 

Stuart

[Kappa]

Well, on one particular trip last year when I was fishing off a large point on the venue in question with a friend, we were both fishing over a large (relatively widely dispersed) bed a bait. We were fishing the same area with the same bait and the same rigs (or so we thought), but only he caught. We both found this rather puzzling, so decided to more closely examine our rigs in the margin. It turns out that the artificial corn he was using was actually more boyant than he had anticipated, and not having checked his rig in the margin ( ) he had essentially been fishing a short zig-rig. On the other hand, my bottom bait had stayed on the bottom but had not been picked up.

 

That is very interesting, historically I believe bream often seemed to come on the top rig of two hook rigs so perhaps the are feeding off the bottom! How short was short by the way?

 

Rich

[Stuart Wright]

If memory serves, I think it was around 10 inches or so, so not a long way off the bottom but evidently still enough to make a difference on that particular occasion.

 

It's certainly something I'm going to be experimenting with again when the temperatures rise a bit.

[Anderoo]

Hi everyone,

 

Firstly, what a fantastic thread! I've really enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately, I don't have the same experience as many of you when it comes to fishing for specimen Bream, but I did spend last Autumn targeting Bream in one of the more historic 'SB' venues referred to throughout this thread.

 

Although I'm still learning (largely thanks to this thread!), there is one point that has been touched on that I can offer some observations on. I can't remember who, but someone earlier on in the thread mentioned that they didn't put much weight behind the idea of Bream disturbing the lake/pit bottom and subsequently eating the food items left 'wafting' mid-water. Similarly, Lutra mentions this in the previous post.

 

Well, on one particular trip last year when I was fishing off a large point on the venue in question with a friend, we were both fishing over a large (relatively widely dispersed) bed a bait. We were fishing the same area with the same bait and the same rigs (or so we thought), but only he caught. We both found this rather puzzling, so decided to more closely examine our rigs in the margin. It turns out that the artificial corn he was using was actually more boyant than he had anticipated, and not having checked his rig in the margin ( ) he had essentially been fishing a short zig-rig. On the other hand, my bottom bait had stayed on the bottom but had not been picked up.

 

Unfortunately, these were not SB, but an interesting none the less.

 

Keep up the great debating lads - I will be reading with interest!

 

Stuart

 

What a brilliant first post! Please do continue to contribute, I have a feeling you have more experience than most here, myself included. Having the bait off-bottom has been mentioned before but this is the first time someone's posted about a definite like for like experience. There have been theories of bream wafting small baits off the bottom but not much to back it up. What time of year was it, and was it day or night? Also, do you catch many bream on just fake baits?

[Stuart Wright]

What time of year was it, and was it day or night? Also, do you catch many bream on just fake baits?

 

That particular session was late September and the action came between 1am and 3am, although, if I remember rightly, there was another short feeding spell just before dawn when another bream was picked up.

 

The idea on that particular trip was to use critically balanced hook baits comprising of one piece of artificial corn and one piece of real corn, with the fake corn trimmed accordingly. However, my friend's hook bait wasn't as balanced as he'd hoped and it ended up as an unintentional zig-rig - which proved to be more effective!

[Dick Dastardly]

Welcome to AN Stuart and thanks for your interesting contribution.

[Kappa]

but I did spend last Autumn targeting Bream in one of the more historic 'SB' venues referred to throughout this thread.

 

Oooh just rembered this, can you say which one? Is it near Oxford?

 

Rich