I know last time I said there would be more to come on the ‘species hunting’ front and there will be, but in the interim, I want to talk a bit more about one of my very favourite fish to target: gilthead bream. Back when I started this blog, I wrote a long piece about fishing for giltheads from the open shore and to some extent, much of the information contained in there is still valid. My basic rig also, despite much temptation to tinker with it, has not changed although I have experimented a little bit with hooks which I will talk about in a minute.
What confuses me most is that despite the presence of these magnificent fish along the north coast of Cornwall I see very few people out fishing for them. I don’t know if it is because most anglers would rather go and sit it out on the Fal or Helford trying to catch them or if there is a general lack of confidence that they really are there on the north coast and can be caught quite readily. Perhaps the reason is that the really big bream in the 7lb + category all seem to come from the estuaries and anglers believe there is a better chance of contacting one there. I suppose I shouldn’t complain as I regularly have my pick of any number of potential marks when I want to go breaming but it still perplexes me when I see so many anglers out plugging for bass and precious few having a try for a fish that (in my honest opinion) knocks spots off bass as a sporting proposition.
I think it’s fair to say that bream fishing on the north coast is still a bit of an unknown world. When I talk to people I meet about it, they all seem to be aware that gilts are caught on the north coast but few have any specific details or have had a decent attempt at it themselves. Some people might refer to fluke catches of gilts when bassing or instance, but few have followed up on that to establish a pattern for targeting and catching more. The fact is that if you are even vaguely handy at bait fishing for bass from the rocks, there is no reason why you can’t do well on bream. All that is required is some attention to weather and sea conditions (plus time of day) and a bit of imagination in how to approach the fishing.
In my own fishing, I think in terms of visualising how a shoal of bream is likely to move through an area. You might only get one group of fish pass you per session so it is pretty crucial that you have baits in the right spots for them to come into contact with. I still hold to the assumption that north coast bream move quickly over sand, stopping to pick over rock features. I also suspect that bream like to explore areas such as holes and depressions in soft ground. An ideal feature then might be something like a series of rocky outcrops with scoured out pits around their bases. I don’t think it is necessary to have a bait absolutely inch perfect tight to the base of the rock, but I do think it is better to be too close and risk a snag than too far away and miss a chance. The bottom line for me is that when I’m bream fishing, I never just cast on to open sand or at random. I always aim to put my baits as close as possible to rock features.
I talked before about how difficult it is to get consistent hook-ups with bream. Some violent bites leave the angler striking into nothing while a series of rattles and slack line can result in a deeply-hooked fish. The ‘classic’ bream bite with a sudden bang on the rod tip followed by the whole rod whacking right over is only one of the bites you can get from gilts. Slack line bites are very common too and I take the nature of the bite, either pulling away or moving towards as an indication of which way the bream are moving around the feature that I’m fishing to. This is quite an important piece of information as it can help you decide where you might want to position your baits to intercept them as well as (if fishing in company) having a good idea who is likely to get a bite first.
One of the most difficult things to decide is what to do when the line is continuing to slacken, the fish clearly has the bait in its mouth and is moving towards you. Personally, I rarely strike at slack line, only when I am sure the fish is moving away from me. Quite often, slack line bites from bream never develop into a pull and the fish drops the bait. Whether you want to strike at these kind of bites are up to you but the way I see it in my mind’s eye, a strike with the hooks and line facing out of the mouth will only clatter the hooks into the front of the mouth and the teeth and there is little opportunity to get a good hookhold here. This is likely to result in a missed opportunity as, from time to time, the bream do turn and pull away giving you a better chance to strike into them.
I have thought a lot about how to get a ‘bolt’ effect like carp anglers use to get hook-ups with savvy carp. The problem here is that these anglers are looking to get hookholds in the carps’ lips which is highly impractical with giltheads. The most common hookholds with bream are in the throat or in the scissors. Indeed, I have landed more fish hooked outside the mouth than I have hooked in the lips area. I think giltheads are very adept at spitting baits out that they sample and don’t like, the way that I have approached getting consistent hook-ups is to use end gear that minimises the risk of spooking them so that they move away confidently with the bait before coming up against resistance.
On the continent, guys fishing for bream using surfcasting gear often use exceptionally long traces, way beyond what is normal in British beach fishing. My standard rig uses a hooklength of around four feet which is long enough to give some breathing space to the taking fish but short enough that it doesn’t tangle excessively when conditions are turbulent (although I often shorten down a foot further in rougher seas or if there is a lot of weed on the bottom). Lengthening this trace when possible could prove to be effective and I have even considered the possibility of ‘hair-rigging’ baits so that the fish effectively swallows the bait but the hook takes hold somewhere in the roof or bottom of the mouth. I think in this manner, small but strong carp hooks (which I have found to be next to useless for standard fishing with the bait whipped on) could be used to their maximum potential for gilthead fishing.
I am still not entirely happy with my choice of hook pattern for bream fishing. For the time being, the Kamasan B940 short shank in 1/0 is still my go to hook but it is just a bit too pliable for my liking and I am always looking out for alternatives. I experimented for a short time with a pattern similar to a Big Mouth or Manta Xtra in size 1/0, but I feel it is a little too large and the wire is too thick to penetrate well. This is the crux of the problem with hooks for gilthead bream. Too thick a wire and the hook doesn’t seem to penetrate well enough but too thin a wire and the hook will bend out in the fight or during landing. The long, rifle-round-shaped point on the B940S really does seem to stick in better than other hooks that I’ve tried. The gauge of wire is more of a medium than a heavy and the hooks are not that difficult to bend in your fingers. Still, I have had plenty of bream that pulled hard enough to nearly break the line but did not bend the hook so I will keep on using the B940S until I find something better. I do wish this pattern came in boxes of 100 like the standard B940 though as I change hooks frequently when fishing and I fairly rattle through them.
Perhaps some of the problems people have with getting started fishing for north coast bream are to do with location. Often I meet other anglers who know pretty well where the areas are that most of the bream come from but not necessarily the exact marks. I think what they are missing is that exact marks are really not that important. The foraging giltheads seem to follow patrol routes that take them along and past all the shallow rocky areas so anywhere where you can feasibly get to and fish that has rock features and mussel beds is likely to be visited by bream at some stage of the tide. The only thing for the angler to do is to fish the spot and find out when the bream come through. Another point that I made in the last piece that my experience continues to back up is that most of my bites come in water that is approximately 6-10’ deep.
Using these loose principles, this year I have done a fair bit of fishing at a brand new mark for me that I scoped out and liked the look of. I was searching for a spot that fished well over high tide and this one looked like it might be a good place to start (plus I had heard a whisper that someone had caught bream close by a couple of years before). It was little surprise to me that it turned out to be a pretty reliable spot to catch gilts in the last half of the flood, although the dropping tide is next to useless. I have never seen anyone else fishing this particular spot although there are known marks either side of it. This is typical of north coast bream fishing where accessibility dictates that suitable spots tend to be found in small concentrated clusters. This is not to say that finding ways to fish new tasty looking areas can’t be done, what is sometimes necessary is to access the mark whilst the tide is low enough and be prepared to be cut off for the duration of the session. This is what happens at the new mark I have been fishing, disconcerting at first but safe enough as there is enough room to escape to higher ground if the sea does get too boisterous.
What was most interesting to me about getting to know the new mark and the way it fishes was learning about the way bream move along that particular area and, in particular, the rocky feature that I picked out to fish to. This is little more than the tip of a large permanently uncovered rock that narrows into a little ridge that drops down to the sand and is covered by the water along much of its length. It became apparent to me that fish explored the inside edge of this rock and moved left to right along its length as every bite I got fishing on the shoreward side of the feature was a slack liner, both from bream and bass. I naturally assumed then that the fish came from the left and across the bay and explored this feature before continuing in a northerly direction somehow. However, this reading of the situation was proved to be entirely wrong. After a few solo sessions there, I went back with my mate Roy hoping to bag a bream or two each. Roy set up on a slightly different mark off to the right fishing to the right and the seaward side of the rock. To cut a long story short, Roy had one bream and dropped another whilst I never had a bite. This, to me, showed that the fish were in fact coming right to left around the seaward facing far side of the rock then doubling back and exploring the inside edge. This idea was proved further on my next session where I decided to try fishing over the back of the feature into the gully beyond. The bream I caught off this spot took off like a greyhound out of a trap and sprinted out to sea, presumably the direction it had been facing when it ate the bait. If it had been facing the other way, the bite would have been a slack liner and the fish would have shot back around the rock and most likely been lost.
As you can see, I have made a crude attempt to illustrate the layout of the mark, the features, and the movement of the fish with the spots I’ve caught off and the angles of the casts. Incidentally, this picture is a pretty accurate rendition of how this mark (shape-wise) looks in real life so if you can figure out where it is, I recommend you go and give it a try – it’s pretty good! This particular spot, as with most of the better ones I know, has one or two safety issues that would become apparent if and when you clap eyes on it. That is part of the nature of north coast giltheading too, most of the places have some sort of element of danger and it is us up to you to work out the safest way for you to go about your fishing there.
What confuses me most is that despite the presence of these magnificent fish along the north coast of Cornwall I see very few people out fishing for them. I don’t know if it is because most anglers would rather go and sit it out on the Fal or Helford trying to catch them or if there is a general lack of confidence that they really are there on the north coast and can be caught quite readily. Perhaps the reason is that the really big bream in the 7lb + category all seem to come from the estuaries and anglers believe there is a better chance of contacting one there. I suppose I shouldn’t complain as I regularly have my pick of any number of potential marks when I want to go breaming but it still perplexes me when I see so many anglers out plugging for bass and precious few having a try for a fish that (in my honest opinion) knocks spots off bass as a sporting proposition.
I think it’s fair to say that bream fishing on the north coast is still a bit of an unknown world. When I talk to people I meet about it, they all seem to be aware that gilts are caught on the north coast but few have any specific details or have had a decent attempt at it themselves. Some people might refer to fluke catches of gilts when bassing or instance, but few have followed up on that to establish a pattern for targeting and catching more. The fact is that if you are even vaguely handy at bait fishing for bass from the rocks, there is no reason why you can’t do well on bream. All that is required is some attention to weather and sea conditions (plus time of day) and a bit of imagination in how to approach the fishing.
In my own fishing, I think in terms of visualising how a shoal of bream is likely to move through an area. You might only get one group of fish pass you per session so it is pretty crucial that you have baits in the right spots for them to come into contact with. I still hold to the assumption that north coast bream move quickly over sand, stopping to pick over rock features. I also suspect that bream like to explore areas such as holes and depressions in soft ground. An ideal feature then might be something like a series of rocky outcrops with scoured out pits around their bases. I don’t think it is necessary to have a bait absolutely inch perfect tight to the base of the rock, but I do think it is better to be too close and risk a snag than too far away and miss a chance. The bottom line for me is that when I’m bream fishing, I never just cast on to open sand or at random. I always aim to put my baits as close as possible to rock features.
I talked before about how difficult it is to get consistent hook-ups with bream. Some violent bites leave the angler striking into nothing while a series of rattles and slack line can result in a deeply-hooked fish. The ‘classic’ bream bite with a sudden bang on the rod tip followed by the whole rod whacking right over is only one of the bites you can get from gilts. Slack line bites are very common too and I take the nature of the bite, either pulling away or moving towards as an indication of which way the bream are moving around the feature that I’m fishing to. This is quite an important piece of information as it can help you decide where you might want to position your baits to intercept them as well as (if fishing in company) having a good idea who is likely to get a bite first.
One of the most difficult things to decide is what to do when the line is continuing to slacken, the fish clearly has the bait in its mouth and is moving towards you. Personally, I rarely strike at slack line, only when I am sure the fish is moving away from me. Quite often, slack line bites from bream never develop into a pull and the fish drops the bait. Whether you want to strike at these kind of bites are up to you but the way I see it in my mind’s eye, a strike with the hooks and line facing out of the mouth will only clatter the hooks into the front of the mouth and the teeth and there is little opportunity to get a good hookhold here. This is likely to result in a missed opportunity as, from time to time, the bream do turn and pull away giving you a better chance to strike into them.
I have thought a lot about how to get a ‘bolt’ effect like carp anglers use to get hook-ups with savvy carp. The problem here is that these anglers are looking to get hookholds in the carps’ lips which is highly impractical with giltheads. The most common hookholds with bream are in the throat or in the scissors. Indeed, I have landed more fish hooked outside the mouth than I have hooked in the lips area. I think giltheads are very adept at spitting baits out that they sample and don’t like, the way that I have approached getting consistent hook-ups is to use end gear that minimises the risk of spooking them so that they move away confidently with the bait before coming up against resistance.
On the continent, guys fishing for bream using surfcasting gear often use exceptionally long traces, way beyond what is normal in British beach fishing. My standard rig uses a hooklength of around four feet which is long enough to give some breathing space to the taking fish but short enough that it doesn’t tangle excessively when conditions are turbulent (although I often shorten down a foot further in rougher seas or if there is a lot of weed on the bottom). Lengthening this trace when possible could prove to be effective and I have even considered the possibility of ‘hair-rigging’ baits so that the fish effectively swallows the bait but the hook takes hold somewhere in the roof or bottom of the mouth. I think in this manner, small but strong carp hooks (which I have found to be next to useless for standard fishing with the bait whipped on) could be used to their maximum potential for gilthead fishing.
I am still not entirely happy with my choice of hook pattern for bream fishing. For the time being, the Kamasan B940 short shank in 1/0 is still my go to hook but it is just a bit too pliable for my liking and I am always looking out for alternatives. I experimented for a short time with a pattern similar to a Big Mouth or Manta Xtra in size 1/0, but I feel it is a little too large and the wire is too thick to penetrate well. This is the crux of the problem with hooks for gilthead bream. Too thick a wire and the hook doesn’t seem to penetrate well enough but too thin a wire and the hook will bend out in the fight or during landing. The long, rifle-round-shaped point on the B940S really does seem to stick in better than other hooks that I’ve tried. The gauge of wire is more of a medium than a heavy and the hooks are not that difficult to bend in your fingers. Still, I have had plenty of bream that pulled hard enough to nearly break the line but did not bend the hook so I will keep on using the B940S until I find something better. I do wish this pattern came in boxes of 100 like the standard B940 though as I change hooks frequently when fishing and I fairly rattle through them.
Perhaps some of the problems people have with getting started fishing for north coast bream are to do with location. Often I meet other anglers who know pretty well where the areas are that most of the bream come from but not necessarily the exact marks. I think what they are missing is that exact marks are really not that important. The foraging giltheads seem to follow patrol routes that take them along and past all the shallow rocky areas so anywhere where you can feasibly get to and fish that has rock features and mussel beds is likely to be visited by bream at some stage of the tide. The only thing for the angler to do is to fish the spot and find out when the bream come through. Another point that I made in the last piece that my experience continues to back up is that most of my bites come in water that is approximately 6-10’ deep.
Using these loose principles, this year I have done a fair bit of fishing at a brand new mark for me that I scoped out and liked the look of. I was searching for a spot that fished well over high tide and this one looked like it might be a good place to start (plus I had heard a whisper that someone had caught bream close by a couple of years before). It was little surprise to me that it turned out to be a pretty reliable spot to catch gilts in the last half of the flood, although the dropping tide is next to useless. I have never seen anyone else fishing this particular spot although there are known marks either side of it. This is typical of north coast bream fishing where accessibility dictates that suitable spots tend to be found in small concentrated clusters. This is not to say that finding ways to fish new tasty looking areas can’t be done, what is sometimes necessary is to access the mark whilst the tide is low enough and be prepared to be cut off for the duration of the session. This is what happens at the new mark I have been fishing, disconcerting at first but safe enough as there is enough room to escape to higher ground if the sea does get too boisterous.
What was most interesting to me about getting to know the new mark and the way it fishes was learning about the way bream move along that particular area and, in particular, the rocky feature that I picked out to fish to. This is little more than the tip of a large permanently uncovered rock that narrows into a little ridge that drops down to the sand and is covered by the water along much of its length. It became apparent to me that fish explored the inside edge of this rock and moved left to right along its length as every bite I got fishing on the shoreward side of the feature was a slack liner, both from bream and bass. I naturally assumed then that the fish came from the left and across the bay and explored this feature before continuing in a northerly direction somehow. However, this reading of the situation was proved to be entirely wrong. After a few solo sessions there, I went back with my mate Roy hoping to bag a bream or two each. Roy set up on a slightly different mark off to the right fishing to the right and the seaward side of the rock. To cut a long story short, Roy had one bream and dropped another whilst I never had a bite. This, to me, showed that the fish were in fact coming right to left around the seaward facing far side of the rock then doubling back and exploring the inside edge. This idea was proved further on my next session where I decided to try fishing over the back of the feature into the gully beyond. The bream I caught off this spot took off like a greyhound out of a trap and sprinted out to sea, presumably the direction it had been facing when it ate the bait. If it had been facing the other way, the bite would have been a slack liner and the fish would have shot back around the rock and most likely been lost.
As you can see, I have made a crude attempt to illustrate the layout of the mark, the features, and the movement of the fish with the spots I’ve caught off and the angles of the casts. Incidentally, this picture is a pretty accurate rendition of how this mark (shape-wise) looks in real life so if you can figure out where it is, I recommend you go and give it a try – it’s pretty good! This particular spot, as with most of the better ones I know, has one or two safety issues that would become apparent if and when you clap eyes on it. That is part of the nature of north coast giltheading too, most of the places have some sort of element of danger and it is us up to you to work out the safest way for you to go about your fishing there.