Bream Tips from the Maribyrnong Masters

Yesterday I competed at the Maribyrnong Masters and I put together this video of the day's events. I have to say, it's bloody hard to make a good video whilst you are fishing as you miss too many of the things you'd like to say because you are, you guessed it, fishing.

There were a few things I did right to secure my prize. Firstly I was fishing with 6lb mono and a 45cm 5lb fluro tippet. I wanted to fish weightless but there was some current in the river and without any weight I couldn't get to the bottom. I started by adding 1BB split shot but that didn't seem enough. So then I added another 1BB.

It's really hard to tell if you are actually getting to the bottom with as minimal a weight as possible. If you are on the bottom, there's is very little resistance and if you are not, then how do you know? Of course you could load on the lead but then you would loose natural presentation. By natural presentation I mean the way the bait sinks as it falls through the water column. I have often noticed hand fed bream smashing whatever I was feeding them, clearly because the bait was drifting down at a natural slow pace. My mate found this out the hard way. After an hour of watching me catch fish, he added an extra split shot and voila, he found his baits getting taken from the bottom.

I was using number 8 circle hooks and won't fish with anything else. I set the drag to absolute zero and let the fish hook themselves. I could go further and fish with an open bail arm and then slowly tighten when I see the fish taking line, perhaps I'll try that next time. Bait was scrubbies, garden worms, chicken, chicken soaked in oyster sauce and yabbies. The yabbies tended to have their heads bitten off but not the tails. I won't be using them again. The scrubbies, worms and chicken seemed to be equally successful.

The other key was the use of berley. We found structure where fish could hide under and then lure them out with burley. I have heard people say that bream need structure. But what do they mean? Do they mean isolated vertical poles or pontoons and piers the fish can stay under in the darkness. I suspect its the latter but don't have enough experience to really know. Once we located likely spots we lured the bream out with handfuls of bread with aniseed pellets. I wet the mixture just enough that it forms a ball that disintegrates as it sinks. If you wet it too much, there is no disintegration at all. It was clear this was a good idea, as several spots yielded zilch until the burely came out.

I have a few improvements to bream fishing I'd like to make on our next trip:

• Don't use berley unless you are aren't getting bites. It didn't happen on this trip but berley can attract lots of small fish.
• Use PVA bags to get an isolated amount of burely into one spot. Chucking in handfuls of bread spreads the burley over too big an area.
• Improve the burley mix. I'd like to add crushed pilchards or something with a real fishy smell.
• Improve my knots, we had several bust offs from big fish. There is a knot I'll be blogging about soon that creates an over 100% line strength connection. Why didn't I use it on this trip - laziness! Off course you could use a higher breaking strength line but then it might be seen.
• Learn how to use my rod. When the big fish strike I should probably tighten up the drag. Bream have hard bony mouths, I doubt the hook will tear out. This is probably a matter of experience but I will be tightening up a bit more on the next trip to find out.