Phillip Gentry
After the spring storms move through the Upstate this Easter weekend, the pull of the full moon has a lot of Upstate anglers thinking about bream fishing. For veteran bream angler Jim Reedy, finding and catching bream entails a mix of new technology and old school know how.
“Don’t matter where you fish, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find bream,” said Reedy. “Start out on shallow flats in 4 – 5 feet of water. The best areas will be surrounded by weeds, lily pads, or woody cover with a big sandy area on the bottom. Look closely and you can see the shallow depressions on the bottom where bream are bedding.”
To most anglers bream is a collective term for several species of sunfish. The top two most sought after are bluegill and shellcrackers. The two species prefer similar habitat but may vary a little in the order of when they’ll move shallow to spawn. Shellcrackers typically come in a little earlier than bluegills, but since both species spawn several times through the summer, you can expect to find a lot of overlap in the same areas.
“Most anglers will tell you the peak of the bream spawn is 3 days before the full moon and then again three days after,” said Reedy. “But since they spawn nearly all summer long, you can catch bluegill and shellcrackers from the first of May through the summer.”
Reedy uses two primary tactics for bream fishing. He will rig a tiny 1/64 bream jig on the end of the line about 3 feet below a tiny cork. He tips the jig with a wax worm or piece of red worm and flips the rig into likely bream bedding areas using a long jig pole. He also like to go straight bait and tie a #4 light wire hook on the line with a split shot. This is also fished under a cork with a wax worm, red worm, or cricket for bait. He’ll cast the split shot rig using an ultralight spinning combo on 6 pound test.
“I prefer wax worms, but they’re hard to find everywhere,” said Reedy. “Crickets are easier to get, but they end up getting all over the boat. If we use crickets in May, we’ll hear crickets chirping somewhere in the boat the rest of the season.”
For the technically inclined, Reedy said a good side finder unit can not only record bream beds from a distance of 50 feet but can mark fish in the beds. A quick run through a shallow area can pin-point as many fish as he can catch in a day’s fishing.
“Look for dimples on the graph, then look for fish marks in the dimple,” he said. “Once you see it and understand what you’re looking at, you get pretty proficient at it pretty quick.”
Aside from the Upstate’s big reservoirs like Hartwell, Clarks Hill and Murray, small state lakes and farm ponds can also be giant producers of big bream. Typically these bodies don’t accommodate big rigs so Reedy suggests relying on your senses to find fish.
“Look for shallow areas with a lot of bubbles,” he said. “Bream fan the bottom and that stirs up silt so the water will be dirty and the surface will look almost foamy. If you have a good nose you can even smell them. Bream put off a distinct odor when they’re spawning.”
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Phillip Gentry is the host of “Upstate Outdoors,” broadcast from noon to 2 p.m. Saturdays on 106.3 WORD FM or online at 989word.com. This week’s guest will be Lake Hartwell BASS Elite winner Brandon Cobb and GADNR fisheries biologist Anthony Rabern.
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Photo by Phillip Gentry
