Episode 314: Bemm River Bream With Byron Tea Hill

Byron’s Bemm River Bream Fishing Tips

• Being observant when you arrive at the boat ramp can help you to quickly identify areas where the fish might be holding. Take note of the wind direction and head for exposed points, as bream will typically be aggregated in these areas. Check the water level as low level may indicate the mouth is open and the system is getting tidal movement. Look for freshwater if there has been recent rain, as this will push bream down towards the mouth of the river.
• Byron doesn’t place too much weight on lunar cycles, tides etc as he fishes tournaments and otherwise grabs whatever opportunities he can get to hit the water. However, a bit of breeze is definitely useful, provided it’s not so strong that line control becomes difficult.
• Aside from exposed points and banks, the Bemm has weed beds that drop away into mud at around 50-100m out from the shore. These are commonly places where bream will be feeding.
• Don’t waste too much time casting at fish when you’re confident that they’ve seen and refused your lure a number of times. It’s more productive to move on and find a more active school of fish to target.
• Byron likes to take just a single lure box in his kayak, plus a few plastics in his bag. He finds that having a small number of lures in which he has confidence forces him to think about how and when to present lures for best effect, rather than constantly wasting time chopping and changing lures.

Byron’s Bream Fishing Tackle

• A 2-4kg spin rod, 1000-2000 size reel, 6lb braid and 4lb fluorocarbon leader is a pretty good all-round combo. Byron will use straight through fluorocarbon for fishing cranks at times and may size up or down leaders slightly as conditions dictate.

Byron’s Top 3 Bream Fishing Lures

• A Daiwa Bait Junkie 2.5” grub, or similar grub style lure is a versatile option that will take bream all year round and in pretty much any kind of structure simply by varying the technique. The Bait Junkie has a fatish body and a particularly thin tail. Allowing it to be easily skip cast and giving it great action at the slowest of speeds. A 1/16 oz jig head is often Byron’s starting point, but he’ll vary it from 1/8oz to 1/40 oz internal weight, depending on what he’s doing. There are numerous techniques that can be used, but two worth learning are the “lift and drop” and the “burn and kill”. The lift and drop is simply letting the lure sink to the bottom and then gently lifting it 1-2 ft with the rod before dropping it back to bottom while reeling the line to maintain contact with the lure. Pause times before the next lift vary, but are often 3-5 seconds. The burn and kill involves winding a lightly weighted grub quickly for a few metres, then suddenly stopping for a few seconds before repeating the burn.
• The OSP Bent Minnow is a great surface lure for bream fishing. Worked in twitches and pauses, it will often get hit by an actively feeding bream. However, at other times it can be used to locate active fish that boil behind the lure without taking it. Once located, switching to a grub will usually get the strike.
• The Jackall Chubby is a great hard bodied lure for bream fishing. It can be fished in different ways and different structures, but the easiest is to slow roll it over weed beds, paying particular attention to sandy patches between the weed beds. The Suji Shrimp and Pink Eye Shrimp at Byron’s preferred colours.