Astronomical numbers of bream

Gippsland Lakes

Brett Geddes b.geddes@bigpond.com

Bream fishing does not get any better than this! Get ready for some crazy tallies and sizes this month. As a result, the fishing effort for nearly all other species has been put on the back burner for now.

The whole lakes system is filling with salty, clean water and pushing right up into Lake Wellington and the Latrobe River. When this happened about six years ago, the whole area fished of a huge lake. Two days later I did a solo trip in the same area, and my first two bream went 45cm then 43cm. I thought I had found the motherlode of trucks. Sadly, the rest of the bream were all 35cm or under for the rest of the day, but I did land around 40 of them, and once again it was fantastic hardbody sport in the skinny waters of Lake Vic.

The real champions of this stunning lake action are Barry Martin and Gordon Fraser. I watched them for hours one morning, and boy did they pull some cracker bream from the boat. While close by in my kayak, I landed just a few modest bream of around 38cm, but the boys were hooking big fish with nearly every cast, and it was incredible to watch. They netted quite a few around 40cm at first, and then 42 and 43cm fish started attacking their hardbody and blade lures.

Gordon then wrestled a much bigger fish across the shallows. These larger bream fight so hard in the skinny water, screaming off sideways to the boat. Gordon eventually held up a brand new PB fish at 46.5cm, and that is a really nice trophy for any lure angler. The boys went on to release over 70 bream that day, and it’s fair to say they left them biting flat out. On a few occasions we had triple hook-ups on this impressive school of bream, and what a joy it was to see the Gippy Lakes holding such prodigious numbers of healthy, feisty solid bream.

Barry mentioned that quite a few males were in spawn mode, and I backed him up on that as I also saw a few dripping, ready to breed. I have never seen this in April before, but keep in mind they also started spawning super early last winter so that means they have been reproducing for nearly nine months now! It goes to show that bream take full advantage of favourable conditions when needed.

Bream On Prawn Bait

Bait anglers are also cleaning up on the bream, and plain old prawn seems to be by far the best. A special mention goes to Graeme Beams who knows the area from Hollands and the whole of Lake Wellington better than anyone. Each trip he has been writing down the length of each and every bream as soon as he releases them, and it’s so impressive to see what he has caught for the day. He has given me his score sheets and all I can say is he has been a very busy angler. The stand out fish are truck bream around 44cm, along with plenty from 38-42cm. Some bream are down to 25cm, and there’s even the odd big eel in the mix.

I counted Graeme’s tallies, and often he gets over 20 bream in four or five hours on the water. One bream he caught twice within the same hour – he was removing the hook from a 34cm fish when he noticed another one of his hooks deeply imbedded from an earlier bust-off. That indicates that bream happily survive when released with hooks attached, so it can be better to leave a hook in than attempt to extract the hook and cause harm or death to the fish.

THE JETTIES

Once again, when I talk about bream and landing thumping fish, this name needs a mention. I should call Justin Kohte the Prince of Paynesville, as he continues to send me pics and reports that challenge any belief or logic for a land-based angler.

I keep seeing him with bream between 44 and 47cm along with cracker flathead around 70cm or even bigger. The real interesting thing is that he uses such a wide range of lures, from Hurricane hardbodies, crabs, soft plastics and the Muss lure, which imitates a mussel.

YELLOWFIN BREAM

A quick mention about the yellas down at Lakes Entrance. Justin Dingwall landed four or five real trucks to 45cm recently, and they are a challenging beast. They live in fast-flowing, salty water right near the ocean outlet, and often tight around rock groynes and other structure. They are well known to fight and pull much harder than black bream of the same size. As a consequence, they provide a real challenge for even the best of lure anglers, and Dinga mentioned how he also bust quite a few off.