The black bream. Perhaps responsible for the upsurge in the world’s use of rubber tails. Shy but aggressive. Easy to find but hard to catch. You can often see them swimming around yacht clubs or jetties but they’ll ignore almost anything you throw at them. Some say they can never be mastered.

Black bream are common in the rivers and estuaries of Australia's lower west, southern and south east coasts. Their range extends from the Murchison River in Western Australia to Myall Lake in Victoria and they are also found in the tidal rivers of Tasmania and around Flinders and Kangaroo Islands. Occasionally you’ll see them in coastal waters, particularly in the gulfs of South Australia. They almost never leave our estuaries, unless they’re flushed out to the ocean during extreme flooding, but they can handle almost any water type.

They prefer to live around mussel encrusted rocks, snags or pylons near bridges and, when hooked, will try to put you under any snag in the area, which they will know intimately. They can be very timid and are attracted to lights at night but also shady areas during the day.

They are hermaphroditic, which means that they can have both female and male gonadal tissue. They can and do spawn more than once during each breeding season, generally in the middle to upper estuary and mostly in late spring through to early summer. Bream have slow growth rates considering how long they live and this must be part of any sensible angler’s mindset when fishing for them.

They grow relatively quickly for their first few years (which is still slow by other fishes’ standards) but then slow down in their latter years, only growing about 1cm a year. A large bream of 35-40cm is about 15 years or more of age. They can take anything from 5 to 10 years to reach legal size and they can reach a maximum age of over 25 years. Seeing as they are so slow to grow, it makes good sense to take care of the larger breeding bream as they are vital to ensure future populations.

The Ultimate Opportunist

A bream is the ultimate opportunist. Yes, they have their favourite foods but they’re part of a large pack and must compete with often much bigger members of the school for any food that comes their way. In the Swan and Canning Rivers, they generally have peg-like teeth to prise mussels, barnacles and tubeworms from rocks, piles and pylons.

Bait fishing isn’t as glamorous as lure fishing for bream these days but don’t think it doesn’t work! Most people would be hard pressed to argue the fact that baits absolutely do catch more fish than lures … so what baits do you choose?

Bream certainly love the soft insides of a mussel but, with so many blowfish in the Swan River these days, there’s no way you’ll be able to get that down to a bream. A lot of people have different thoughts about how to use and rig mussels but the best way I’ve found was “stolen” from a couple of young guys I fish with, Alex and Luke, who have got this technique wired.

It was Alex that started tinkering with the idea of using mussels from jetties but how to rig them was a puzzle. Shelling them and baiting the flesh soft and fresh works at night but, during daylight hours, the blowies just annihilate your offering in seconds. Alex was the bright spark that first put on a whole one, shell and all, and this threw a serious curve ball at the blowies!

His method involves a 1/0 weedless Worm hook (like a Gamakatsu Worm G-Lock) with the kink near the eye, but there are several cheaper alternatives as well. The kink near the eye allows you to thread the point through and into the lip of the mussel and then back out again, offering perfect bait presentation. Using no weight, and with just a 6-8lb fluorocarbon leader tied to your braided line (or mono) for company, you drop your bait right next to the pylons, avoiding snagging up to the side but close enough for your bait to fall alongside the wall of the jetty. Let me tell you, bream go nuts for this.
                                                
Make sure you feed the line off your spool when the bait is falling, as this helps it drop straight down, not off to the side like it does when you let it pull the line off the spool itself. There’s no need to move it at all, just let it sit and wait for the fish. Patience is the key but sometimes the mussel is smashed on the drop. We put this down to the fact that most jetties have the mussels stripped to the waterline by bream and, when a stray mussel lobs into the water, they all fight for it, with often the biggest bream shouldering the others out of the way to get to it.

Mussels also seem to be the answer to the age old question of, “I always see these bream schooling around my boat/jetty/pontoon/mooring and I can never catch them. They ignore lures and baits alike. Can they be caught?”

Well, it seems they can indeed … by using mussels!

Compare this to lures that emulate baitfish. How many times do you see small fish the size of your lure or smaller swimming right next to the bream? If they eat minnow lures then it stand to reason that they’d have to have a ping at these fish at some time, but they see them all the time and your lure blurs into the background. How often do you see bream attacking bait?

However, plop a nice juicy mussel into the same water and it’s like the cast of The Biggest Loser coming back after a hard day on the Stairmaster to find a lone packet of Twisties in the dorm. Interestingly, the catch rate from a boat doesn’t seem to be any better or any worse than from shore.

Bream are quite simply an awesome fish. Anything that can survive for over twenty years, numerous toxic spills, algal blooms and thousands of fishing lines and nets, sometimes right in the shadows of a big city, commands respect and should be treated as such. Where would we be without them?