THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Then unfortunately it was back either to more conventional gear, or to heavier duty flowing traces which
produced dozens of tope to forty eight pounds. What a good day.
Sticking with Pwllheli for a moment, another bream trip I took part in for a magazine feature some
years earlier was aboard Dave Carey's boat 'Judy B'. Besides it being a beautiful day and producing lots
of decent fish, two things in particular stand out about that trip.
The first was that as the tide died away and the fishing started to tail off, Dave produced a huge container
of boiled rice with he put into a mesh bag tied to the side of the boat so that it was just lapping in the
water, slowly releasing the rice grains, which in the slack tide fell by gravity out of view a short distance
from the anchored boat.
This was sufficient to revive the flagging attentions of the bream which came right back on the feed
again, though not with quite the same intensity as earlier. And when they came up they were bursting
to the gills with rice grains.
It's not as if we were using rice as hook bait, so just why it should trigger that level of response is
difficult to say. The important message here however is that it did.
Dave also had another trick up his sleeve to winkle out a few more extra fish. A sliding float rig with a
one ounce drilled bullet lead stopped by a swivel around twelve inches above a size four hook baited
with tiny sliver of mackerel.
The bait was allowed to plummet dragging the reel line through the centre of the float until it touched
bottom. A small piece of elastic band was then tied tightly around the line to act as an adjustable stopper
and slid down until the float was holding the bait a couple of inches clear of the sea bed.
What little tide there was could then be used to slowly trot the float and bait away from the boat,
imparting just enough movement to get the bream interested again.
I spent half an hour fishing the same way myself, and I have to say that the excitement of watching the
float bob, plus fighting the instinct to strike every time it twitched, made for some of the best edge of
the seat fishing I've enjoyed in many a long time.
On my local patch, over the past several years, an odd black
bream has been picked up over the boulders along the
Lancashire coast and further up over similar ground around
the southern edge of Walney Island. But not in a way that
could be regarded as with either regularity or predictability.
Genuinely, just odd ones.
Charlie Pitchers and I also had a few out from Caernarfon in
our boat, which should come as no surprise as they had been
about in a couple of localised holding areas around Trefor and
Dinas for quite a few years. And we again had a good session
on them in the same area aboard Andy Owen's boat 'Morgan
James' out from Port Dinorwic.
I've also caught black bream from my own boat well up inside
the Menai Strait, and more recently, Tony Parry has
discovered quite a small but prolific hot spot for them off
Rhyl. All part of what could be argued is a progressive
advance northwards since those early days back in the 1970's
when Sussex ruled the roost.
Graeme Pullen, Sussex Bream
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