To check the fish for doneness, use the tip of a sharp knife and cut through the thickest part of the fillet. Bluegill Bream The meat is white and flaky and can be sweet if the fish comes from clean, cool water. Whatever their relative merits, the two fish are very different. The best bream produce the most gorgeous — and incredibly meaty — great white flakes prone to dryness when overcooked, it must be admitted while the sea bass are all finesse, much more delicate in texture, although every bit as flavoursome.
When it comes to matters of procreation, bream are a gregarious sort. Instead of finding their own little love nest, they join in with their friends and neighbors to form colonies of individual spawning nests. Sometimes bream construct their nests so closely to each other that the edges almost touch, but more typically, each nest is separated from its neighbors by a foot or two of unoccupied ground.
This aggregate of spawning nests is known as a bream bed. In all but the dingiest water, finding a bream bed is easy. Just use your eyes. Bream fan out a shallow depression in which to lay their eggs. Once the nest is fanned clean, the saucer-like depression often appears as a light spot on an otherwise dark background.
Put together 50 or of these individual nests, and the result is a pockmarked bottom that is hard to miss, once you know what to look for. Bream typically form their spawning colonies in 2 to 6 feet of water over a firm bottom. If there are a few stumps around, that is better. Protected shorelines are favored over windswept ones.
So now that we know why, where, and how to find a bream bed, the big question is when. Many sunfish species are multiple spawners, meaning they complete several spawning cycles each year.
In the South, the first spawn is likely to be in April, and you may find bedding fish as late as Labor Day. Lest Mother Nature make it too easy though, bream don't spawn continuously throughout that time. For a few days every month, you expect to find bream hard on the beds.
A bed that is a flurry of activity one day can be deserted just a week later, only to come back to life again when the time gets right. So, when is the time right? Expert bream anglers have a quick answer for that question, and the answer is when the moon is full. These anglers bet their success on the firm belief that the best bream fishing is done on that moon phase.
If all the other conditions are right, a full moon pulls bream onto the beds where they are easy pickings. Other conditions must be met though, including temperature and photoperiod day length.
Bream don't spawn in cold water, and they don't spawn in the middle of winter, when just a few hours of weak sunshine makes for a day. Once the water is from 65 to 70 degrees, and the longer days of spring have arrived, the bream are ready to go.
The last ingredient needed is the full moon. The moon is an extremely powerful force in the life of all living things. Although just like the sun, it rises, passes overhead and then sets every day with nary a thought from us, to a wild creature the forces of nature are not overshadowed by a clock, calendar or any other human contrivance that tracks the passing of time.
Lest you doubt the moon's power, keep in mind that the moon's gravitational pull is the driving force behind ocean tides all across the globe. If a force is strong enough to influence something so incomprehensibly immense as the planet's oceans, then it likely affects every living thing on the planet too.
People turn into werewolves on a full moon. Delivery rooms are filled with women giving birth on the full moon. Murder and suicide rates skyrocket on a full moon. Plant your garden on the proper moon phase as described in the almanacs, and you will harvest a bumper crop. None of these have been definitively proven to be true.
A bed is simply a depression on the bottom for females to deposit eggs that is guarded by the big male bream you will be targeting. A bream bed can consist of a dozen — scores or hundreds — of these beds in tight quarters. Anglers can eliminate a large amount of water as not having potential to have bream beds by simply finding where the right bottom substrate exists and fishing only those areas.
Typically, bream beds will be found in small pockets and coves in feeder creeks and in protected areas in shallow water down to about 5 feet deep. Often, they are found considerably shallower, sometimes in very skinny water.
If the bottom substrate is mucky or steep with large boulders, you can safely cross it off the list of high-potential bream bed sites. Much of the water can be eliminated before you even start the searching process, saving time better spent hauling in big bream. Bream anglers know these panfish have a strong connection to woody, weedy or rocky cover, and for the majority of the year, fishing around these objects is crucial.
But during the spring bedding season these fish are most interested in having the right bottom substrate to enable them to spawn and make more bream. The presence of woody or weedy cover is certainly not detrimental to bream bed potential. If the right bottom substrate is present in an area with stumps, logs or weeds, bream will be strongly attracted to the area. But they will still fan beds and the males will be guarding the nests.
When you begin the fish-finding process, two components are vital to bream bed fishing success. First is locating the bed prior to getting too close and spooking the males off the beds. The second component is presentation of the bait or lure. Trust me that the second step is much simpler if you get the first one right. Water clarity is one aspect of bream bed fishing that can work very much to your favor — or be the reason for problems. Apply common sense and logic with regards to the impact that water clarity has on depths of beds and the distance the boat must be from a potential bedding site to avoid spooking the fish.
When fishing clear water, with the sun at the proper angle, it is often possible to see the beds from a reasonable distance away. As in bass fishing, quality polarized glasses are a huge asset here, because if you locate the beds by sight you control the situation. You can position the boat a reasonable distance away and effectively present the bait to the bedding fish. However, if the water is clear with the wrong sun angle, or shadows interfere, or the angler is simply inattentive, a boat may drift on top of beds before the angler has a chance to see them.
Bream will likely scatter when this occurs. But patience is seldom the forte of folks fishing bream beds.
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