Fill it to the bream

In the angling community, kayakers historically lead the way in conservation.

Kayak fishing doesn’t pollute the water with oil and gas. Kayak anglers are also easier on the fish. The kayak angling motto is “catch, photo, release.” As April rolls over into May, many freshwater anglers turn their attention to bream fishing.

Many anglers cut their teeth intently watching a cork with a worm or a cricket attached to the hook while sitting on some friend or relative’s dock.

Fast forward through all the lessons and seasons, and every May that rolls around still invokes that enthusiasm for bream fishing. Whether your intent is to catch a few for the table, garner a few extra points in an online multi-species kayak tournament, or just have a fun day of kayak fishing, bream are ready to accommodate.

Bluegills

In the Carolinas, “bream” is a colloquial term for any number of hand-sized and hand-shaped sunfish species. Some are longer, some are wider, some have shades of red, shades of yellow, and even shades of purple in their coloration. The most popular of these are bluegills, but coming in at a close second are redear sunfish, a/k/a shellcrackers, followed by redbreast in some coastal rivers, and warmouths, which can be found in a variety of locations, but prefer swamps and backwaters.

May is historically thought of as the season of the bluegill spawn, but all bream species are known to spawn during the month of May, and the key to catching them is locating spawning beds.

Most anglers overcomplicate locating bream beds. Start out on shallow flats in 4 to 5 feet of water. In deeper venues, shallow may be 10 to 12 feet, but the idea is the same. The best areas will be surrounded by weeds, woody cover, or lily pads with a big sandy area on the bottom. Look closely and you may see the shallow depressions on the bottom where bream are bedding.

These areas shine in bright sunlight and typically get re-used from year-to-year, so chances are at some point during your paddling forays, you crossed an area and hopefully made a mental note.

Some kayak anglers get hung up on only targeting bream during specific phases of the moon. But by doing so, they often miss some of the best bream fishing to be had. Many anglers believe the peak of the bream spawn is 3 days before the full moon and then again 3 days after, but since they spawn nearly all summer long, you can catch bream from the first of May all the way to autumn.

One bluegill fishing strategy is the standard bream fishing rig. A long, ultralight, bream pole is rigged with a No. 6 hook, split shot weight, and topped off with a toothpick cork. Impaled on the hook is a live cricket, the kind easily found at most bait shops.

No action or retrieve is needed. Simply drop the rig into the bed and wait for the cork to go under or slew off to the side. When the action is hot, the cork may not sit on the surface for more than a second or two.

Another strategy combines electronics and an ultralight spinning or spin-cast combo. As some beds may be too deep to see unaided, look for small dimples on the bottom contour, a phenomenon that will look like the surface of a golf ball on kayak-mounted sonar.

Staying well back from the area, or even returning to the area an hour or so later if you think you might have spooked the bed on the first pass, cast small artificial lures, especially anything with a spinner blade inline or attached just above or below the hook.

For live bait anglers, use a slip cork adjusted to roughly 18 inches above the bottom of the target area and slowly drag a redworm or cricket and a No. 4 or No. 6 gold Aberdeen hook. Bear in mind that bluegills typically feed up, so present your offering above the fish.

Shellcrackers

In the case of shellcrackers, start out by noting several “dead bays” within close enough proximity to paddle. The term describes a cove off the main lake or major tributary creek that doesn’t have a creek with flowing water coming into the back of it. Other great locations to find spawning shellcrackers are long, rocky points.

By mid to late April, and again at least once a month through the summer, shellcrackers will move into the backs of dead bays or on top of a long point, which is another good spawning location. Kayak anglers can find them as shallow as 4 to 6 feet on the first pass of the season, and then move out progressively deeper with each spawning cycle of the summer. The average depth this time of year is about 10 to 12 feet deep.

Trying to pattern shellcrackers between spawning cycles is a bit of a mystery. Shellcrackers are opportunistic feeders that eat their fair share of clams and mussels from area lakes and rivers, making any location that displays a lot of mussel shell debris a likely hotspot. The fish will just as readily eat small crustaceans like crayfish and aquatic insects. The common thread is that these scrappy panfish make their living on the bottom of the lake, so kayak anglers need their bait on the bottom to catch shellcrackers.

It’s addictive

Most panfish like bluegills and crappie feed upward, making a midwater presentation preferable. But shellcrackers feed down and have sharp eyesight. They can see any subtle movement on the bottom, as well as detect scent from bottom-dwelling food sources.

Kayak anglers who are after bigger shellcrackers might do better to avoid fishing a spawning bed altogether, and concentrate on the larger female fish holding beyond it.

Similar to crappie, shellcracker males guard the nest, the females hang back on the next drop. To target these larger females, position your kayak somewhere between the bed and the next drop-off, where both positions are within a cast length.

An easy way to target shellcrackers is to use a cut-bait style of fishing. Anchor the kayak both fore and aft so that it won’t swing while lines are cast out in positions around the clock. In the right locations, the angler might be able to accomplish this by beaching the kayak on a point with the nose facing the water.

For cut baiting, use whole night crawlers on a simple split shot rig and a No. 2 Aberdeen hook. Make sure you can reach a variety of depths, because the fish move in, and move up and down, on the point or into the bay.

While there are some specific differences, redbreasts in lowcountry rivers tend to behave more like bluegills. Warmouths will feed similar to shellcrackers on the bottom, but have no problem eating crappie jigs and even larger baits due to their bass-shaped mouths.

Bream fishing is addictive in any fashion, but kayak fishing for them adds another dimension altogether. In no time at all, the years melt away and the sight and sound of that bobber suddenly jerking out of sight, or that bug going “smack” on the surface will return anyone to simpler times, back when a tug on the line was all that mattered.