Over the many years that I have been fishing (since I was about three years old) I can say that I have learnt so many different techniques that over these years I can go out for a fish for a variety of fish species with both bait and lures and find that I can bring home a feed of fish for the wife and kids about 96% of the time that I go out. To try and pick a favourite fish would be very hard, but I would have to say that the bream would have to be right up there.

I have chased bream from the Swan River and down to the Peel Estuary at Mandurah in Western Australia, Corny Point in South Australia, Mallacoota Inlet to Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, and most of the east coast of Australia up to Noosa. During the early part of my fishing career all of my bream were caught on bait and as I learnt more I then slowly started to more over to using small minnows and plastics, catching a few bream here and there.

The author with a solid bream caught while flicking a squidgy blood worm in the upper reaches of the Woronora River.

Over the last ten years I have been chasing bream on a fifty, fifty basis. 50% bait and 50 % lures, that is until about 18 months ago, when I start to go out and practice to catch bream on small minnows and plastics. My wife reckons that all I have done is just come up with another excuse to get myself out on the water.

I keep telling her that I need to keep on practicing so that I can get my self acclimatized and learn new techniques so that I can give the competitions a good go. In February 2004 I entered my first ABT Bream Tournament at Bateman’s Bay and the excitement had built up in me so much that for the 2 weeks before the competition all I could think about was how I was going to fish it. What techniques I was going to use, what type of minnows and plastics I was going to try and how I was going to put them into action.

Due to the fact that you can’t fish in the waterway that the competition is going to be held in for 2 weeks prior to the competition I had to go out and practice in places like the Georges and Parramatta Rivers, Middle Harbour and the Pittwater. It was during these months leading up to my first tournament that I struck up a number of new friendships. Guys like John Nikita, Mark Heffernan, Daniel Bray and Mark Higginbottom.

All of who did one of my “How, when and where to fish in Sydney classes at either the Bluewater Tackle Centre at Concord or the Amazon Outdoor Fishing Centre at Wetheril Park.

Floating pontoons and rocky foreshores.

Not being able to resist an invitation to go and have a fish, when John Nikita suggested that we should go and have a go at the bream population in Middle Harbour, I just couldn’t refuse. After launching at the Tunks Park boat ramp at the crack of dawn it wasn’t long before we started to pull in some great fish, and at one stage the live well was so crowded that we had to start letting some of the fish go.

This plumb yellowfin bream took a liking to a white Manns 2” Augertail Grub while fishing in the clear waters of the Port Hacking.

Those few hours that I spent with John on his boat opened my eyes to a few more techniques that I could add to my arsenal. A couple things that I did notice was that we never left the confines of both Long and Quakers Hill Bays, and all of our fishing efforts was concentrated to casting in and around the floating pontoons, in between moored boats and along rocky foreshores.

Once the water depth got more than 5 metres we either moved closer to the shore or moved to another spot. Also, if we did pull a fish from underneath a floating pontoon we would spend a fair amount of time casting back into the same place (maybe ten or so cast each). If we did manage to hook onto a fish and then drop it before it got back to the net, and the subsequent casts resulted in no takers, we would change the colour of the plastic. This would sometimes result in another fish.

One thing that I did notice was that I was getting more flathead, flounder and silver trevally than john was. Now this was mainly due to the fact that John had a much lighter jig head than me, and I was also allowing it to stay on the bottom for a few extra seconds.

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Swing moorings.

Anglers like Ian Miller, Chris Metcalfe and Andrew Cornford have had a lot of success casting their lightly weighted plastics and small minnows at the sides of the boats that are on swing moorings, and it wasn’t till I had a long talk with guys like Richard Robson and Daniel Bray that I started to fully understand how you were supposed to work these boats.

If you take note of the pontoons in the back ground, this is where Albert pulled his first ever lure caught bream out from underneath.

Even though many bream are caught using this technique, it is not just a matter of casting your plastic as close to the edge of the boat and then just allow it to sink to the bottom.

You have to work the shady side of the boat early in the morning, also work the up stream side of the current, fish in no more than metres of water, allow it to sink at a slow rate (lightly weight jig heads, say half to one a half grams or use Aberdeen hooks and no weight at all), when it finally gets to the bottom you should allow it to sit for a while then either work back to the surface in a short flicking of the rod tip. If this doesn’t work you could always give the plastics by just moving the rod tip so that the plastics just wriggle on the bottom.

Now, to the newcomer, all of this can become very confusing. What I would suggest is that you try a different technique every three cast, until you find the one that works. Selecting the correct boat can also be a major problem if you don’t know what you are looking for. Richard Robson suggested that I start on boats that have those ani-fouling bumpers around them, as well as boats that have small fish feeding directly under the boat. The larger fish will usually be just below them and out of sight.

Since I have been trying these different techniques I have caught a number of 38 to 40 cm bream from around boats that I would have never given a second look eighteen months ago.

Mangroves.

Fishing the edges of the mangroves is not new to me, as I have been doing it for years. All I needed to do was anchor up near a stretch of mangroves on a rising tide, lay out a berley trail of pieces of tuna and chicken pellets, set a couple of rods with bait runner reels and just wait for the bream to take off with the bait. If I was using minnow lures I would just slowly motor past and cast into every little nook and cranny that I thought would hold a bream or two. Nothing has changed except for the use of berley and the bait runners.

The early morning start of the Bing Lee/Sportsfish BREAM qualifier was very spectacular as the 21 boats lined up for the staters gun.

There are a number of places that I like to anchor up (2 anchors to keep you parrel to the mangroves and about twenty five metres out) and cast small minnow lures and plastics into. The key to my success is to target the part of the mangrove that will have a fair amount of water running out from it as the tide falls, maybe a gutter that is situated in amongst the mangroves.

This tends to stir up a lot of the bottom, uncovering and dislodging feed for the bream. It is then just a matter of making a fairly long cast back towards the base of the mangroves and working it back to the boat.

I remember one day when I was out on the Georges River with my son Chris and we managed to pull eleven bream from the same place in just less than thirty minutes. The hot action stoped when I got blown away by a monster of a bream.

Oyster racks - fixed and floating.

Oyster racks come in many different shapes and sizes, and they can be either a floating type or one that is fixed to a series of poles. I have fished the racks in places like Nambucca Heads, Port Macquarie, Foster, the Shoalhaven River, Greenwell Point and Narooma, just to name a few. Once again most of my experience in fishing the oyster racks had been with the use of berley and bait. That was until about ten years ago when I visited Coffs Harbour with the family and Chris and I went down to the Nambucca River for a spot of lure fishing with one of the local oyster farmers.

Until that day I have never been busted up, snapped off, dragged under and over and totally blown away by so many bream, trevally and flathead while fishing on the inside of the oyster racks. At one stage we had to increase the breaking strain of the leader material to eight kilos, just so that we could drag the fish out before they took the line onto the oysters. It also wasn’t until those ten years ago that I started to use braided line to fish for bream.

What made the experience that much easier was the oyster farmer had an electric motor fitted to the front of his boat and having the electric mounted on the front of the boat makes it so much easier to navigate in between the racks from half tide to the bottom. The boat that I currently have has a stern mounted tiller electric motor and if I am working the oyster racks I have to have my boat going backwards so that I can control it. It is especially hard going against the tide and the wind. Maybe one day I will get enough money saved up so that I can by a bow mounted remote controlled electric motor.

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Web postings.

What I have noticed over the past few months is that there have been a number of postings onto various web sites about all the negative sides of tournament fishing (along with a number of positive postings) that this has prompted me to put this article together. As stated earlier I have spent most of my life bait fishing for bream and other fish species, and have been only fishing with lures and plastics for them over the past ten years. But what I have gained in local knowledge, on the water experience, along with the new friendships that I have made wipes out the few negative sides of tournament fishing. Like the cost, lack of sleep and the bitching by some of the competitors.

The Jones brothers working those plastics along the edge of a marina at the entrance to Hen and Chicken bay.

A while back there was a posting on Sportsfish about the cost ($1,000.00 per boat) to enter the Sydney Harbour Bream Challenge. It started off with general complaints of the cost of entering, which then generated into a name calling fight on the site. To bring some sanity back to the posting Bing Lee and Sportsfish put together a BREAM qualifier for any member to enter.

The winners and a team drawn out of a hat would be fully sponsored to compete in Sydney Harbour Bream Challenge. As most of you that read this site you would already know that Michael Passau and Mathew Taylor came fourth, while Greg Lee and Patrick Debattista finished 21st out of 34 boats.

One thing that I have found is that there are a great number of anglers out there, who on the right day will put together a great bag of fish and will keep on doing so, but when it comes to competition fishing blow themselves away by putting far two much pressure on themselves. Fishing is a great sport and these types of competitions have brought fishing to a new level in Australia. My suggestion if you are thinking of entering these comps, go in with the idea of enjoying yourself no matter what happens. Otherwise you will go nuts trying to figure it out.

My first time.

The time had come when I was to compete in my first BREAM competition. Not having fished the Clyde River at Bateman’s Bay before I put in a fair amount effort into research of the place by contacting a few guys I knew that had fished there before. The practice day saw me team up with Mark Heffernan, Daniel and Ben Bray. We worked our way along the rocky foreshores, in and around oyster racks and we also drifted past lines of mangroves casting into every nook and cranny we could find. Even though there wasn’t a lot of bream to be caught, I did managed to get two legal bream, 6 dusky flathead, 3 dinner plate sized flounder, yellowtail, heaps of snapper and even an octopus. Was I ready for the next two days of competition? I thought I was!

John Nikita and I pulled some great fish out of Middle Harbour. The great thing about it, we didn’t have to move to far.

During the two days of the competition I landed around twenty fish, but only two of them were the bream (both under the 25cm legal size) that I was targeting. I managed to get more dusky flathead, a whiting, 3 flounder, stacks of undersized snapper and even more yellowtail. Even though I did no good on the bream during two days of the competition, I did managed to come away from the weekend down at Bateman’s Bay with so much more knowledge that it would take me a couple of weeks to take it all in. Another thing that I did find very enlightening was the ease at which you could talk to most of the other anglers and pick their brains about the techniques that worked for them. Wade Eaton took out the boating section of the comp by fishing by fishing in 15 to 25ft of water with 1/8oz jig heads, a technique that had worked for Steve Wilson from Queensland before.

Hoping to improve my efforts I then fished along side Steve Edmonds from Shakespeare Australia in the Sydney Harbour Bream Challenge that was held in my home town waters of Sydney harbour and even though we only managed to weight in four legal fish (25cm to the inside fork of the tail) and finished 32nd, but I achieved want I wanted to and that was I did improve on my first effort at competition fishing, a double doughnut.

During the course of the 3 day competition we had on the water offers of advice from Team Elegant Anglers (Glen Helmers & Scott Greentree), Team Bateman’s Bay and Tackle (Wade Eaton & Ben Roberts), Team Enterprise Marine (Richard Robson & Bill Maguire) and Team Otto’s Fishing Business (David Tosland & Ron Abdilla) and both Steve and I would like to thank these guys for their help.

One thing I know, is that my time fishing in these competitions has not been a waste of time as it has improved my fishing knowledge and techniques that I use when chasing bream with either minnow lures or plastics, that it has also given me the opportunity to meet some very knowledge anglers who are willing to share their secrets with anglers like myself. I can see myself fishing these types of competitons for many years to come.