John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
July 15th 2010
Dream Bream
Over the weekend I was alerted to the fact of a large, decapitated, fishy corpse on the bank of Willow. It was first described as a double figure carp but on inspection, it turned out to be a bream in the eight pound plus category. I was surprised. As far as I was aware, not many bream have come out of Willow for many years. It used to be a sparkling bream venue with plenty of big fish back in the 80s. It just shows how little we know about our lakes.
In fact, if we do look back to the 80s we'd find that double figure bream were not uncommon in what is now Lily Lake and were almost to be expected in what is now Willow. And as for the main Kingfisher Lake, in the days it was a trout water, bream well over fourteen pounds were actually landed on nymphs.
So what's the position with our bream today? Well, the big lake still produces double figure bream but smaller doubles - if there is such a thing - and not so many of them. The Willow Lake? Well, as I've said, something of a mystery there. But perhaps the best news is the fact that bream are coming back in large numbers in Lily. Most of them are in the two to four pound category but I've heard tell of fives and perhaps sixes. If these fish continue to grow, it could be that in a few years we'll get our dream bream back again. Or, perhaps they're there all along and we're just not tapping into them.
And the best way to catch bream? Well, I suppose it's difficult to beat the feeder tip approach, isn't it? On the hook, I always favour a small red worm with perhaps a couple of maggots. Artificials might now do the job better than the real McCoy I always used to use back in the 80s. The method feeder perhaps? But I'd also recommend putting bait out by hand or by catapult too. If you get a sizeable shoal of decent bream in the swim you've got to hold them. Buy any of the ground baits that we sell in the shop and lace the mixes thoroughly with sweetcorn, maggots or hemp to keep the fish burrowing.