Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
James Champkin
Specimen bream hunting made easy
LIKE an oasis of green and blue nestled within the concrete jungle of East London’s urban sprawl, the reservoirs of Walthamstow offer the travelling angler something different from ‘ norm’.
With a choice of five waters, carp are the main species, with specimens to more than 40lb. These waters are well run by Will Barnard and his team at Thames Water and have attracted anglers from all over the UK and Europe for decades.
But it wasn’t the carp that were in my sights during my last trip down there. It was the shoals of big bream that can be found in abundance in Reservoir Two.
An ‘ open- to- all’, days only ( although in fact there are times that night- fishing is allowed) day- ticket water, this venue is fairly unusual in that bream will feed well during daylight, which is not typical of the species.
Bream, especially specimen bream, are renowned nocturnal feeders, and the quarry of the long- stay specialist angler.
But even though I spent the night on the banks there’s no real need for bedchairs and bivvies when targeting Walthamstow’s bream population.
Why I target bream?
My bream journey began 11 years ago. I was fishing a Norfolk gravel pit with a friend, targeting specimen roach, when he hooked and landed a 12lb 1oz bream. The sheer size of the beast blew me away and from then on I wanted to catch something similar.
A few weeks later I caught a 13lb 7oz slab and that really lit my fire! To date, my biggest bream is a huge 17lb 2oz specimen which I caught from one of the Tring reservoirs.
It is the difficulty of catching these really big girls that drives me. Once bream weigh more than 13lb, they become particularly difficult to catch. That said, even though low doubles aren’t as difficult – especially here – they still make for an interesting challenge.
Avoid weedy areas
The first rule of big- water bream fishing is location. I look for features such as bars and plateaux because bream love to feed on and around these.
If you can locate an underwater feature like this, it should be a reliable area.
The next thing look for is a decent depth. Anything between 8ft and 15ft in an area of open water is perfect. Bream are a lazy species and tend to spend most of their time away from bankside disturbance, in the deeper water where the light levels are much lower.
The one angler- friendly aspect of bream is that they actively roll on top. At dawn or dusk, they often give themselves away by porpoising, making shoal location child’s play.