Once upon a time over twenty years ago we used to regard Red Bream as a blasted nuisance and switch over to lures to avoid the bream munching their way through every bait that was sent down to the sea bed. Often anglers would catch twenty or thirty in a day, fillet and skin them and take home a coolbox full of the most delicious fish imaginable. Then they were "discovered" by the restaurant trade and within two years the red bream were gone from our shores, totally wiped out, extinct or so we thought!
Its twenty years or more since the Red Bream put a bend into my "tickling stick" rod. Oh yes! there were those of us that had little light weight rods just for bream and occasionally we would have a battle royal when a stumping great Pollack or Cod took a liking to the scrap of worm we would fish for bream.

So imagine my surprise last year when my friend Murray Collings skipper of the charter boat "Swallow" out of Looe told me that one of his charter parties had caught a few red bream over a legendary inshore mark that had once been byword famous for the quantity and quality of its red bream fishing.

Then just a few weeks ago we were fishing down west on Hatt Rock when Murray brought the "Swallow" alongside and said that they had caught a few bream on the spring tides the week before. He didn’t have to give me the numbers, I already had them in an old book of Decca numbers from the age of "steam driven navigators!" what’s more, I had the shore marks as well.

Daft really, but I had worked up a nervous enthusiasm during the ensuing week or two because the weather turned to rats and the boat didn’t even get off the moorings. The day finally arrived when the tides were climbing away from neaps and the weather was good enough for us to make the trip. I was both apprehensive and excited because catching red bream was something I had truly thought I would never do again in my lifetime. Imagine if you will that Bass had been wiped out twenty years ago and now you were going on a trip where you might just get to see one again, leave alone catch one. This was the level of emotion I was feeling.

We had a couple of sideways looks in Clive's tackle shop when we ordered up a fiver’s worth of king rag and a box of frozen Calamari, but never mind we knew what we were fishing for and a rag and squid cocktail is the best bait I know for red bream, or for any bream for that matter.

Tackle, bait, a coolbox full of cold coke, fresh sandies, biscuits and Mars bars on board we fuelled up and turned the Reverie seawards and don’t think I am going to tell you the mark, ask again in five years if the bream multiply, especially if we can keep its location secret from the commercials.

Arriving over the rock we spent half an hour pinging it with our sounder to see if we could pin point the fish. Sure enough with the tide well into the flood we spotted a cluster of fish tucked in tight behind the eastern edge of the rock, hopefully this would be the red bream.

Short tight drifts over the pod of fish was the decision and if this didn’t work we would put the pick in and see if we could float the boat back till it was just uptide of the fish. This is one of the great advantages of the Lowrance 16xi mapping plotter. You can see where the fish are and where your boat is in relationship to them.

Rigging my 12 lb class outfit with a single boom rig and a four foot trace of 15lb fluorocarbon to a size 1/0 hook baited with a single worm and a six mm wide strip of squid cut from the calamari, I decided to use a four ounce sinker right away even though I knew an ounce less would do. I wanted to get the bait down to the fish with the minimum of fuss.

Half a dozen pouting later we decided that the pod of fish on the sounder were definitely pouting!!

So we went looking again. I am a firm believer that if you cannot see the fish, then they are not there, so what is the point in wasting your time fishing barren ground.

Motoring quietly over the outside edge of the rock, the sounder in 4x zoom so that we had a close-up view of the bottom, we could see little groups of fish all the way down through the line of drift. So setting the boat up again, we drifted down the southern edge of the rock. Problem was, that by this time the tide was beginning to move quite quickly and it had become quite difficult to detect the bites. Fortunately we had all elected to fish braid on our light outfits which gave an advantage in this situation. I do not think we could have felt the bites on monofilament.

After a few more pouting had been swung inboard, I had a very real banger of a bite. That was certainly not a pout I thought……… reel in and check your bait.

As I was reeling in I noticed young Charlie Reaves with a smile like a Cheshire cat as he played a fish upward. "Don’t think this is a pout" he said "gave me real rattler of a bite!"

Within a minute or two I was photographing a beautiful little pound and a bit Red Bream, the first true red bream I had seen in over twenty years. I have got to say that I choked a little before the need to start shooting pictures took over. Within a few seconds Charlie had been photographed and was shaking the fantastic little fish back over the side where it hit the water and was off like a shot. Bream are tough little blighters.

It would be good to say that we found dozens of them just like the old days, but we didn’t. The next drift Charles (senior) caught another red almost a mirror image of Charlie’s and that was it. We fished the rest of the tide and caught more pouting, a few pollack, but no more bream.

Since that trip I have spoken to Murray Collings again to find out how many bream he had caught and he said maybe a dozen or more. There were also some Reds caught off the north side of the Eddystone last year which is not too far away from where we were fishing. The burning question is how much of a comeback can they make. Will they once more populate our reefs and add that wonderful extra dimension to reef (and wreck) fishing again.

If ever a fish needed a protection order slapped on it, to prevent any commercial exploitation, it is the Red Bream. So if Mr Defra is reading this, do us all a favour Sir, find your protection order forms and sign a couple. One for Bass and another for Red Bream.

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