When the subject of fishing in July comes up, the thing that pops into my head is the mayfly hatch. You’d think something called a “mayfly” would have something to do with the month of May, but in the Carolinas, the big hatch is late June and July.
Mayflies are insects that hatch from egg casings on the bottom of streams and lakes. As they mature, they swim to the surface, then fly off. If there are shoreline bushes around, they’ll fly into the bushes.
And all the bream in your pond — and a lot of the bass — will hang around those bushes, waiting to feast on the insects that fall in the water.
I don’t really understand why people don’t get excited about the mayfly hatch like we did when I was a kid. Younger people — even people my age — don’t get excited about the mayfly hatch or the catalpa worms like they used to. I can remember getting excited about the mayflies, and we’d go nuts at the thought of catching bream and catfish when the catalpa worms fell out of the trees.
I used to really enjoy the mayfly hatch when I was a kid living on Lake Murray. It seemed like the bass fishing picked up, and topwater fishing got 100-percent better. Twenty years ago, when people saw the first mayflies, they’d head for the water.
But I have always enjoyed summertime fishing for bream even more than bass. Let’s face it; in July, the water is hot, you’re getting close to dog days, we’ve left the good spring fishing behind for a long time, and some people are even starting to think about football and deer hunting.
So I fish for bream as soon as the mayfly hatch shows up. I love to catch bream on a fly rod, using little bugs and flies, and I love to catch ’em using a cane pole and crickets. They’re fun to catch, easy to catch, and they make for some good eating. I personally know that because my buddy Kevin Van Dam and I fried up some bluegill filets for dinner when we stayed together at one of the Bassmaster tournaments earlier this year. They were awesome the night we cooked them, and the leftovers were even better than cold pizza the next day.
Mayflies really like willow bushes and trees; they’ll fly up into any kind of bush, but the willows seem to attract them. So you look for willow bushes and fish around them. Another thing to look for is flocks of birds, which will feast on mayflies. If you see birds attracted to one area of a lake, you’d better fish there. The birds would be knocking the mayflies out of the bushes onto the water, and the bream would get into a feeding frenzy. And if the fishing slows down, you can always take a stick and hit the bushes and knock some of them off — that will get the fish going again.
I love to downsize my tackle when I fish for bream. I like to use a fly rod with any kind of little fly or popping bug. You can fish a cane pole or fiberglass pole, or you can fish a little ultralight spinning outfit, using 4- to 6-pound test line, and fish crickets or spinners.
It’s fun to downsize everything you fish with, and bream fishing is something extra good you can do with your wife, your kids or your girlfriend. But it’s something you don’t see people doing as much these days.
If you really can’t shake the bass bug, mayflies can still help you in July. Bass become get very active when mayflies are hatching, and the topwater fishing is just excellent. I think the reason is, in nature, the predator-prey relationship is well developed, with bass being the biggest predator on a lot of our lakes and ponds. When the small fish like bream get active, that brings out the predatorial instinct in a bass. They want to make sure the bream know who’s boss. When you use a topwater plug — whether it’s a Pop-R or a prop bait, the bass want to knock it out — they want to kill it or eat it.
And you will often see bass feasting in mayflies, but not the way bream will — except in certain cases. I’ve fished a lot up north, and it’s incredible how many mayflies the smallmouth bass up there will eat. It’s amazing. But here in South Carolina, the largemouth bass are more attracted to the bream becoming more active.
So if you see a swarm of flies over the water in the shallow end of a pond — if you see fish slurping at the surface, making all kinds of noise feeding on something you can’t really see or identify, you’re probably within range of a mayfly hatch. If you’ve got a fishing rod nearby, you really need to take advantage of it. Many, many of us savored fried bream when we were kids — and a lucky few of us never outgrew that.
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