Bream On Surface Lures

[Hodgey]

G'Day Gang

I apologise in advance to those Raiders who are sick of reading popper posts.

Weather conditions were ideal today, but the bream would not hit the poppers unless it was stationary for at least 8-10 seconds. GregL and Iceman have long stated that this is when pencils come into their own, so I filed the popper away for the day, and tied on the yellow NW pencil featured in a previous post.

The bream weren't hiding amongst the racks, so we had a look at timbered areas holding a lot of shade.

Had a few lookers before a nailed a nice silvery bream about 35cm. Not a great deal of action so we went looking for extended weedbanks. Bingo! The bream responded aggressively to the pencil, and the quality and strength of the fish was the best we have seen for a while.

The fish in top left of picture is the one that came from the timber in the top photo. The smallest fish is 32cm. The rest are very yellow, indicating they have been living in the weeds for a while. Final tally was 18 bream. Weighed the best 5 for 2.7kg. Another great day on the water.

Hodgey

Edited May 3, 2008 by Hodgey

[Guest]

thats a very nice session there Hodgey

Cheers Stewy

[SAfisho]

How were you fishing the pencil? Fast? Slow? I fish my pencils with a continuous walk-the-dog retrieve so if they were hitting it after a long pause were you doing that with the pencil?

[Penguin]

Nice bag of Bream there,

and i dont mind the popper reports, keep em cumin

penguin

[breambusters]

Some good bream there, well done Hodgey

[arpie]

Well done Hodgey, AGAIN!!! You are the bream popper/pencil master!

Got into a few bream myself this weekend - all bar one put back! The only one I kept was a nice 32.5cm one that I gave Gdcalmer, for her folks' dinner! That went very well with her own 39cm one!~ She was stoked!!!

Cheerio

Roberta

[luderick59]

great catch hodgey master of surface lures

peter

[jenno64]

Hodgey,

Never get sick of the popper reports What was the tempertaure of the water you were fishing? Congrats on some very fat looking bream!

Cheers Rob

[The Iceman]

Good going there Hodgey

Dont know if its the angle the pic was taken but looks like you got a mix of black and yellowfin bream there

[Hodgey]

SAfisho

I try to cast the pencil as close as I can to the structure/weedbank edge, and use a fairly vigorous 'walk-the-dog' retrieve to coax the fish out (to give myself a chance of landing 'em ). Then I pause/retrieve/pause/retrieve back to the boat. If (like on Saturday) I obseve a big 'bow-wave' heading for the lure, then I drop the 'pause' and keep the lure maintaining very broad arcs. This means I slow the lure retrieve rate, but work the rod tip harder. This seemed to excite the fish, with some of the surface strikes displacing enormous amounts of water! Hookup rate under these conditions was very high.

jenno64

Water temp is dropping, (down to approx 19 degrees), so I don't know how long they will stay active on the surface. Having said that, the lake's entrance is all but closed, so the cooler water from the sea is not dropping the lake temp as much as it could. I also saw an article recently that alleges bream are a real option on surface lures in Winter(?), so we'll have to wait and see.

Iceman

Spot on mate. Three of the bream had relatively small anal fin spurs(yellowfin?), whilst the rest had more prominent spurs (black bream?). Most of these bream had bright yellow guts on them .. like Yellas

Hodgey

Edited May 4, 2008 by Hodgey