THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Carp colouring up the water preventing rudd successfully breeding appears to have been a major
contributor. But even in the less controlled environments where rudd once thrived and should still be
readily available, their appearances have become fewer and further between. So much so that I struggled
to get the necessary photograph to use here.
I personally have a rather contradictory angling history with the species. Although I've probably caught
many thousands of the things, my experience of them is still none the less limited in the extreme.
This is because I used to catch them from small farm ponds, firstly as a kid getting in to fishing, then
later for use as live or dead-baits for pike and zander.
To be honest, outside of that, this isn't a species I've come across much, and I dare say that a lot of
today's serious coarse anglers are in a similar position.
Probably the quickest fix would be to fish some of the larger still-waters and canals over in Ireland,
where the species seems to be making something of a comeback. Otherwise, a fish you need to identify
specific locations for, then target in much the same way as you would with roach.
BRONZE BREAM Abramis brama
Bucket List status – result
A deep bodied laterally compressed
fish with a noticeable hump on its back
just ahead of the dorsal fin. Here the
anal fin lies around a third of the way in
to a line dropped down from the end of
the dorsal fin, whereas in the silver
bream, the anal fin starts just behind the
dorsal fin.
A greenish brown to greyish brown fish
on the back and upper flanks, becoming
paler lower down, with a silvery sheen
and white on its underparts. Also a fish
with a slimy feel to it which I
personally don't particularly like.
If I was to say I have a soft spot for bream, that would probably be defined as being a hole in the muddy
margins where I would bury the lot of them. Either that or my tackle if there was nothing else left to
catch.
Perhaps I'm being a little bit unkind here, but for such a potentially large fish, they put on a particularly
poor show when hooked, coming in little better than a raft of weed.
Needless to say then that all my bream encounters, except for the earliest ones when I didn't know any
better and needed one to put another tick on my list, are now accidents, usually while carp fishing,
which allows a direct comparison between the two on the day, further emphasising the extent of
disparity in fighting ability between the pair.
Yet from a photographic perspective, I can understand the attraction in perusing specimen bream,
particularly when they get up around the high teens to twenty pound mark, and I know a lot of people
do make a speciality out of targeting them.
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