Catch22 Top rigs for bream
BREAM are becoming ever more dominant on commercial fisheries as each fishing year passes.
While you might not want to catch them in the height of summer, come autumn and winter – when the carp begin to slow down – these docile fish become a bit of a godsend.
Certainly, smaller skimmers can be relied on to feed on colder days when the big fish shut up shop. On some fisheries catches to well over 70lb are regularly taken on pole or feeder tactics. That’s plenty of bites when you consider that the average size of these bream is around the 1lb mark.
Tactics to catch them vary greatly from what you’d employ to nobble a few fish on a river or natural stillwater, and it’s all down to the impact of fishmeal baits aimed at carp.
Bream love fishmeal and see pellets, smelly groundbait and even boilies as a regular part of their diet, to the extent where they’ll take a pellet over a maggot or piece of worm.
So when you’re talking groundbait and pellets, there’s only one method to consider and that’s the feeder. We’re talking cage feeders here for fishing in relatively shallow water, although a Method or Hybrid-style feeder
will also catch. These are not ideal when exclusively targeting bream and skimmers, however.
There’s more good news when it comes to casting. On a commercial fishery with colour in the water the fish will feed happily at relatively short range, so 13ft rods, braid and shockleaders and the ability to put in a Herculean cast are not needed. Instead, a comfortable cast of 30m or so will do you proud.
If you don’t fancy fishing the feeder, though, you can always fall back on the pole and take advantage of its pinpoint precision and great presentation, which will allow you to keep the hookbait dead still over a bed of feed. Again, the distance to fish doesn’t need to be massive and a comfortable 11m is ideal, provided there’s in excess of 5ft or 6ft of water to go at.
And it could well be that a session after bream and skimmers on your local commercial sees you tick off the ‘25lb from a Stillwater’ and ‘Bream’ missions in this year’s Catch 22. You could even get a surprise 1lb perch (they will eat pellets) and even three types of carp to really fill your boots!