Pwllheli Black Bream Bash

A snap decision to try for bream at a local mark proves successful for Mike Thrussell.

I sneaked away for a few hours black bream fishing near Pwllheli the other night. The charter boats inside my home waters of Cardigan Bay have reported low bream numbers generally this year and the size of the fish has been pretty disappointing too.

You’d have thought then that if the boats aren’t getting them, there would be no chance off the shore, but past experience has taught me that that’s not usually the case. The bream often show tight inshore in better numbers than they do on the offshore reefs when they first arrive and they were late coming in this year.

Weather conditions were not great, lots of algal bloom in the water and a stiff northwest wind gusting 6 at times, though the wind was coming off the land, so it would gain me a little more casting distance, which I figured would be critical in the conditions.

I usually fish a pop up rig for the bream, but with the algae in the water chose a simple two-hook clipped up rig with size 2 Kamasan B940’s to keep the baits tight on the seabed.

I sat there for two hours without even a flicker of a bite. An hour before high water I wound in to re bait and found the smallest bream I’ve ever seen hooked fair and square in the mouth. No I hadn’t seen the bite and didn’t even know it was there until I saw it in the waters edge. It must have weighed all of 2ozs!

I switched to a really racy 6500 Mag loaded with 0.30mm diameter line to gain more casting distance and hit the lead high in the sky to maximise the effect of the following wind and gain a few more yards. The bait hadn’t been in the water more than 30 seconds when I saw the tip bounce over. It was a bream about 12ozs which took crab.

High water was well past by now and usually the bites die, but I decided to stick it out a bit longer.

With so much algae in suspension I decided to bait both hooks with fish, one with Bluey to get some real oil scent in the water and the other with mackerel tipped off with a small strip of squid.

I was just about to pick the rod up for re baiting when the tip bowled over and thumped away. This was a bigger bream and a more spirited fight that had taken the Bluey strip. I weighed it in a plastic bag at 1lb 5ozs. Not a biggie, but still a nice fish from the shore this early in the year. I had no other bites and nothing at all on the rod fishing closer in.

It was a tough session, but the key decision was switching to the Bluey strip which held scent longer than the mackerel could, and in that thick algae filled the water there was still a strong enough scent coming from the Bluey for the fish to find it even after 20 minutes in the water. Squid is usually my top bream bait, but it lacked the scent on the day.