How To Fish for Bream

Today I’m here on Lake Moultrie. I’m going to learn a little bit about bream fishing from freshwater fisheries biologist Chad Holbrook. So we’ve got two different types of live bait that we’re going to try with bream today. And how are we going to be fishing this live bait? We’re gonna start out fishing, both of us have worms and our rig is really simple we’ve just got a couple pieces of split shot and a hook ,And we’re just going to be fishing straight up and down because we’re fishing fairly deep in about 20 feet of water on a man made brush pile. And when we’re fishing for bream what what species are we typically looking for?When we say bream in South Carolina that can mean one of about four different species that we might catch they’re all sunfish andWe have bluegill, red ear, red brass and warmouth and where we’re at today blue gills more than likely going to be the most common species. We’re going to be fishing this area and we’re gonna fish the bottom,How do we want to get that cast out of there? Well we’re making a really short cast so we can either just flip the line like this,Or we can try a little sidearm cast. Okay oh I just prefer this to kind of flip that line out like that. We’re gonna wait till it hits bottom yeah we’re gonna wait till it hits the bottom and when we feel like it’s hit the bottom we’ll flip our bale overAnd turn the reel handle a couple times pull the bait back up off the bottom just a little bit and get it in the middle of the structure,And then we’ll wait for probably a bluegill to bite, hopefully soon. There’s a fish attractor system that we’ve got set up on a lot of our reservoirs in South CarolinaWe’ve got about 15 of those here in Lake Moultrie, what it is it’s a good way for us to recycle Christmas trees every year,And what that does is this gives us some woody debris habitat in an area that’s kind of wide open and there’s nothing on the bottom. So without that this would just sort of be a kind of a barren bottom spot. And now we’ve got a spot for a bream and white perch and catfish and the occasional largemouth bass to hang around, okay. Alright first fish of the day,first fish of the day not exactly what we’re looking for but this is, this is a white perch. And they’re also gonna be around this structure they kind of got in here in the 80s and really taken off. That’s about as big as what we’re gonna catch right now, there’s a lot of them in here so they’re a little bit stunted. Alright well we got another one here Lorianne see if we’ve got a white perch again. It doesn’t look like it this one is one of our air bream and this is a warmouth sunfishIt’s got a longer body shape, he does have a little bit longer body shape yep and another common name for this fish here locally would be a momouth. He’s a little small so we’ll put him back in the water and I think this is what we’ve been looking for. Absolutely that’s a nice sized bluegill there. Eaten size, yep eating size. Now if somebody were to catch the bluegill, how would they normally cook them?Usually you would just scale a bluegill and take the the insides out and gut it,And just fry it up, bones and everything, usually bones and everything yeah. They’re a small fish, it’s kind of hard to fillet, you probably would end up wasting some meat if you try to fillet it. So you usually just pick around those bones when you eat it and when you catch a bluegill,You generally look for, generally will look for there’s a dark spot right back here at the base of that dorsal fin. You can kinda see it, it’s a little torn though his dorsal, he’s had a rough life. Somebody tried to take a bite out of him over here, oh yeah. Alrighty away he goes. So we didn’t have a whole lot of luck at the fish attractor this morning. So we’re shifting gears, the fish are probably more in the shallows since the water is a little warm. We have switched from fishing on the bottom to fishing a bobber rig. So let’s see if we can catch something on the shallows. Looks like we’ve caught another fish here Lorianne and it’s another one of our bream so redbreast sunfish. And you can see their body is kind of long, they’ve got these turquoise streaks through the face and their belly always has this nice orange red tint to it. Small bluegill let’s see a dark spot back in his dorsal fin really well on this one. Well it was fun to catch it, let him grow up a little bit. We had a great day here out on Lake Moultrie. We hit some weed beds, some shallow areas, fish attractor. The only thing that we didn’t touch on is fishing around docks for some fish which you can find them there very readily on any man-made reservoir. I hope that you guys learned a lot and we will catch you guys next time.