My 1st 40+ Black Bream :D

[da_houghsta]

Yesterday it was a very nice, hot day, with only a little bit of wind. It has been hot for a while now, and I decided to get out and look for a flathead or two. My usual spots would have been over-run with blowies (Blow Fish for the easterners - seriously you guys would have no idea how bad the blowies are over here without experiencing it!!), so I thought I would try one of Pete's sposts further upstream. Since it's not my spot, I won't go into any details on where it is, only that I just wanted a wade in the water for 45min to an hour before work. It was about 3pm, about mid 30's, mid-tide, stirred up water from a bunch of boats nearby and less than 2 feet of water I think - so I wasn't expecting much.

Pete came along, but didn't feel like hooking a bunch of blowies, so left his gear home. I started out with a gold SX-48, which I was half-heartedly throwing around. I had a few small taps that didn't feel like a blowie, and soon I had a baby bream, only 15cm or so, hooked 2m from my feet!! Feeling a bit more confident about the place, I switched over to a smaller lure - a Blues Code stickbait. I'd lost my prawn looking one, so the one I was using was clear, with fluro yellow back, and a fluro red belly.

After 2 or 3 casts, I did a closer cast just on top of some weed parallell to shore. I don't think I even had time to twitch it once, when something grabbed it and started moving towards shore. I took it for a Flathead since I didn't feel any head shakes - it was just a strong pressure pulling. Then it changed direction and started to pull much more line off quite quickly - I took it for a "bloody big flattie!!" After a while trying to get it to change direction and come to me (it just didn't want to budge), both Pete and I saw a silver shape and a tail come out of the water. For an instant I thought it was mabey a Mulloway, before it dawned on me that it was a bream! Still throughout the fight, it didn't really fight hard, prefering instead to just go sideways and pull, but I soon had it on the shore. After measuring, I realised I had just got a 42.5cm Black Bream - A PB for me by quite a bit!

My previous PB in November was 34cm. Then we went to Walpole, which I was upgraded to 37cm - which seemed like a big just to me then. Now to get something the size of this one was, to me, amazing!! especially upriver, wrong time of day, wrong location, etc etc etc.

Of course, since it was a short session, and I wasn't expecting anything, I didn't bring my camera. So Pete took some pics using my mobile instead. Next time I'll know better!!!

Beautiful colours on it:




After a few photo's, It was time to put her back. She needed about 5 minutes of me swimming her however (it was hot, and we took longer taking photo's than I thought), before she, very gracefully, just swam out of my hand.

A couple more casts revealed a baby Flathead, and a few blowies, which ended my session as I had to go to work....