WINTER BREAMIN’

I love chasing bream in winter. While most pundits will tell you there’s nothing better than seeing cicada-obsessed bream slurp a lure off the surface, I get the same feeling when I detect that subtle bite that only comes when your fishing super-slow presentations in super-deep water.

Over the past few winters we’ve had the opportunity to crack a pattern in my local river which has yielded some of the best bags of bream I’ve seen in decades. The abundance and quality of fish has been a real surprise considering how slow bream grow and amount of commercial pressure on our river. The last time I’ve seen this quality of fish was 30 years ago when we used to target them on live black crabs fishing the nastiest terrain we could find in the deepest sections of the river.

It’s easy to forget the old lessons learnt too especially when they we’re garnished using not-so-trendy bait. While we’ve been fixated on chasing big bream around boat hulls, jetties and over flats with some of the innovative and modern techniques that most bream fishos employ these days, it wasn’t until we merged the two disciplines together of new school presentations with old school locations did we start to see results that once resembled our