WELL, here we are in part III of the bream extravaganza and I can finally talk about a couple of my all-time favourite ways to catch bream and certainly my best confidence tactics for a big fish in a comp. Bream love shallow water and I love casting lures at them when they are in the shallows.
For a start the fish are only in the skinny water for one reason – that is, to feed. This gives us as anglers a very good chance to catch them. The bad news is that the fish are also fairly wary in the shallows so you have to be cunning to knock them over.
Bream often feed on baitfish and they are real opportunists in this regard. If a baitfish ventures too close to a decent sized bream, even if that bream is just chewing contentedly on a barnacle or grubbing for a worm, the baitfish will often become dinner for said bream. There are a couple of keys to taking advantage of this proclivity of bream to turn nasty in the shallows.
Firstly, you have to give the fish a lure that looks something like the baitfish it expects to see. There are a lot of skinny whitebait style baitfish in Australian estuaries so something skinny works well. Bream, especially big ones, have a mouth full of teeth so a skinny lure with good hook exposure is a step in the right direction as well – getting a fish to bite your lure is one thing but a solid hook-up is another. You will also need to put the lure in the right place to catch skinny water bream, so you need a lure that casts accurately and one that allows a fair distance on the cast. You need the distance because if a bream becomes aware of an angler or a boat it will be on edge at best, or just refuse to eat a lure altogether. Don’t be put off by a bit of size either – the bream you want to catch to win a comp will eat a decent sized baitfish.
A good lure for the shallows also needs to run shallow and have a slow rise – this is the key to catching big bream in the skinny water. Even a suspending lure that works in deeper water just doesn’t do the job – the lure has to rise and it has to rise at the right rate. Why this is so I can’t tell you, but the killer technique is to cast the lure about three metres in front of a fish, wind it down a bit, give it a couple of twitches to excite the fish, and then to just stop the lure and let it gently float towards the surface. Once a bream is interested it will generally follow through and eat the lure if you leave it long enough.
Often a fish will very slowly rise with the lure and then just sort of merge with it – the whole thing often takes place in absolute slow motion and the bream even seems to shut its mouth on the lure as though it’s in some sort of dream-like trance. If you haven’t seen it happen it’s hard to believe, but even when you have watched it happen many times it can still give you goose-bumps. It just seems wrong that any predator would eat its prey in slow motion, but it happens regularly and knowing about it can catch you a lot of fish. I am guessing here, but I have to suspect that the way we manipulate the lure absolutely convinces the bream that it is a baitfish in the last minutes of its life. I think bream have a simple philosophy on tasty baitfish – don’t even chase the healthy ones because you can’t catch them, but if you see a dying one just take your time because there just isn’t any need to rush!
One of the exciting aspects to fishing for bream in the shallows is the visual aspect of it. You can find the fish with a good pair of polarised glasses by simply seeing a bunch of them cruising the flat or by looking for “muds”. Mudding is a bonefishing term but it means the same thing when you’re chasing bream. If you see a small cloud of mud rising from the bottom there’s definitely a fish in there somewhere digging for food. The mud will only suspend for a very short time so it is a great way to locate an actively feeding fish. After the fish has been digging and it moves on, a tell-tale grey stain will be left on the sand for about half an hour. When you see these stains you know feeding fish are probably close-by so you need to really look hard to see where they’ve gone.
Catching fish you can’t see is also right on the money, but there are tricks to that as well. Cast with the breeze as far as you can, wind the lure down a bit, give it a few twitches and then wait forever as the lure slowly rises to the surface. Repeat this process until something good happens. This is a bit like bait fishing and the rod will just about leap out of your hands when a bream feels the hooks and takes off. The only way you will muck up with this method is to fail to wait long enough on the pause. Actually a “pause” is probably the wrong word to describe the amount of time you need to allow after the twitches. Perhaps “interminable wait” would describe it better.
The tackle you need for shallow minnow fishing is quite important. The rod should be around the seven foot mark with a nice light tip and a bit of guts in the bottom half. The reel should be light and small because you will be casting it all day. Cheapies will do the job but something with a bit of quality will have a better drag and last a lot longer.
The line and leader set-up is absolutely vital for this job – get it right and you will catch heaps of fish but a slack attitude will really kill your results. There are two effective ways to rig your gear.
Fill your spool with light braid and then tie a long leader to the end of it. If you tie a Slim Beauty Knot (see the Fisho website for step-by-step instructions on how to tie this cool knot) you can use a leader as long as you like. I generally use 10 winds of the reel handle, but you can use more. In the ultra shallows bream hate things over their heads, and guess where the bright yellow braid has to be just before a bream sees your lure? Yellow braid is great in many fishing situations but for casting over shallow fish it sucks. You really don’t need the yellow for fishing in this situation anyway because you are often looking at your lure or fish in the water. The mongrel dull green colour with a long leader will catch a heap more fish. I know the green stuff is hard for you to see, which is exactly the point. Bream can’t see it any better than you can, which is a good thing. Light braid with a four pound fluorocarbon leader is a very versatile way to rig; it catches fish and it gives you a bit of grunt if there are sharp things on the flats you are fishing.
There is however an even deadlier way to rig for shallow water minnow fishing, and that is to use three pound fluorocarbon straight through. Most of the comp guys fish this way and it does have some advantages over the braid and leader combination. For a start you only have to tie one knot to the lure and you are in business. Re-rigging is just as easy if you have some sort of problem, and the bream have a hard time detecting the light, clear line in the air above them or in the water.
There is a lot of room for skill in this shallow water minnow fishing and I rate it as an art form that sits up there with fly-fishing for trout or green weed fishing for blackfish. Watching how the body language of a big bream changes as you manipulate your lure and knowing when to twitch and when to sit is just fascinating and it goes right to the heart of what makes us tick as hunters and food providers. It is possible to get pretty good at this game but the really great thing is none of us are ever going to master it.
Dog walking
There is one other way I like to fish the ultra shallows and that is with “walk the dog” style lures. These lures are wooden or hard plastic and with a bit of educated rod work they zig-zag across the surface. Sometimes bream in the shallows just go nuts for these erratic lumps of hard plastic. Poppers are also good in the shallows but when the water is calm, the walk-the-dog jobs will often out-fish them. When the water is calm and shallow the more subtle and gentle movements of these lures really gets the job done on bream.
Once you master the zig-zag and the pause, these lures are easy enough to use. One trick is to use the dull green braid and a short leader. Long fluorocarbon leaders tend to sink, especially on the pause, and the lure will pull down in the water and refuse to walk properly. The dull colour of the braid means the bream don’t pick it up easily in the air and when you are manipulating a dog-walker there is virtually no line in the water at all, so you just don’t need a long leader.
Shallow water breaming should come with a warning because it is just so addictive, and the dangerous thing is that there is probably a shallow flat with bream on it within half an hour of where you are reading this, if you live just about anywhere on the coast of Australia.
I don’t think I know any bream tricks I haven’t talked about in the past three issues so our long-suffering editor can relax and I will dismount the bream horse and start chasing some other fishy adversaries. If I catch a few, I’ll keep you informed.
