SPECIES GUIDE
Black Bream Fishing Guide
Southern black bream and yellowfin bream are widely distributed and they make great lure targets for many thousands of anglers. Bream are cunning fish and you need good lures to catch them consistently.
Bream are found mainly in estuaries and in the brackish parts of the rivers feeding into them. They love structure and are often found around oyster leases, oyster covered rocks, and dead
trees lying in the water. Bream will also hunt in very shallow water on sandy or muddy flats. Bream have quite small mouths and consequently anglers generally have their best success on smaller lures. The RMG Scorpion 35 is certainly one of the all-time best bream lures. You do need a range of colours in the tackle box because bream are a notoriously fussy fish that sometimes favour one particular colour over another, but a Scorpion 35 in metallic gold with an orange back would have to be my first choice just about anywhere.
The Scorpion 35 casts well for a little lure, it starts to wobble in the first few centimetres of a retrieve, and it really puts out some vibes with its flat “butter-knife” tail and internal rattle.
For best results cast the Scorpion close to cover and then pull it rapidly down to its operating depth of a metre. Use a stop, start retrieve with plenty of pauses and expect the fish to hit on the pause.
If you see a bream tailing the lure, just stop the retrieve and watch the fish eat the lure. When he grabs it, be sure to strike!
Sometimes the fish do favour larger lures and when that happens, the Scorpion 52 will catch plenty of fish – especially big old “bluenoses” that have been feeding on larger fish and prawns.
The Halco Combat also has a reputation for catching large bream. The Combat works best when cast into snag piles and around deeper rock edges. When bream are in an aggressive mood this hard-wobbling lure comes into its own. The Combat is particularly good when fishing for large yellowfin bream in swift tidal runs towards the seaward end of large estuaries.
Bream often feed on slim mullet and minnow style fishes and when they are at this game, the Tilsan Minnow can be deadly. This lure has a very life-like quivering action and bream often hammer it hard when they are in an aggressive mood. I have had particularly good success on the fingerling colour in clear water, and on the classic and golden sunset colours in discoloured water. If you like trolling for bream this is definitely one of the best lures for the job.
At times bream do switch on to larger lures and the Tilsan Bass has certainly taken some whoppers over the years. I often use this lure if very small bream are continually hitting my smaller lures.
This can be annoying and tying on a larger lure such as the Tilsan Bass can help you separate the tiddlers from the big ones you really want to catch.