THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Perhaps not quite as deep in body profile as the more regularly caught bream species, but one that is
readily identifiable by having a base colour of silvery grey with a single large black blotch surrounded
in white where the body narrows just in front of the tail.
Another protogynous hermaphrodite born with both sets of sex organs, which after initially maturing
as a female, can where necessary switch to being a male.
RAYS BREAM Brama brama
Bucket List status – no result yet
Rays Bream are not members of the
family sparidae to which all the
aforementioned sea breams belong.
But superficially, in terms of
appearance, not unlike them by virtue
of having a rounded laterally
compressed body shape. In this case
however it's much more like a rugby
ball with a tail. A noticeably deeply
forked tail in fact.
The pectoral fin is also very long. But
it's the steep rounded facial profile that
immediately grabs the attention, and
the fact that as with the true sea
breams, there is just a single dorsal fin,
though it doesn't start off with a sharp spiky section followed by a softer second section. This one starts
very tall before plunging quickly in height and feels the same throughout. The anal fin, though not quite
as long, is visually similar.
In the fish I have examined, the back and upper flanks were reddish brown becoming silvery on the
sides and under-parts, with hints of yellow in the pectoral fins. An open oceanic deep water fish often
found feeding well up in the water column. Off the Portuguese coast where deep water lies close to the
shore, ray's bream are extensively fished commercially.
Angling boats have also occasionally encountered them around the British Isles. In the main, these have
been off Ireland's Atlantic coast adjacent to deep water. Some years ago however, an angling boat which
put out to fish the edge of the continental shelf from north west Scotland encountered a huge shoals of
ray's bream feeding just beneath the surface at night, where dozens were caught on fish baited feathers.
When I first started sea fishing seriously in the 1970's, reports of rays bream were not that un-common,
while at the same time, still unusual enough for specimens to be mentioned in the angling press.
Occurrences of fish typically in the five to seven pound bracket would start maybe mid summer off the
south and west coast of Ireland, progressively moving up the extreme western extremity of Scotland,
then around the northern tip including Orkney and Shetland on down into the North Sea, which is where
most of the press reports would eventually come from around the onset of winter, all of which is (or
was) part of a routinely predictable pattern.
The problem for these fish was that this migration pattern takes time. So much time in fact that as they
reached Scotland, and later England's east coast, sea temperatures would be starting to fall away.
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