Fishermen know them by all kinds of different nicknames: bream, redbellies, shellcrackers, sun perch, coppernose. Technically, they’re bluegill, redbreast sunfish, redear sunfish, green sunfish, pumpkinseed and warmouth.
The hardy little members of the sunfish family have long been lumped under the general term “bream,” and even though half the fishermen in the Palmetto State might not be able to distinguish between any two sub-species, there’s little doubt that they’re among the best-loved of all freshwater fish.
My first fish was a bream, from Georgia’s Lake Sinclair in 1959. All four of my kids’ first fish were bream, from a pond in a housing development. I knew somebody who lived there — that was my story, and I stuck to it for the four or five years I fished it. All five of those “first fish” were technically bluegill, caught on worms or crickets, all involving a cane pole of some sort.
My grandfather taught me to fly-fish for bream on ponds around middle Georgia. I watched him like a hawk when he would fill a baby-food jar with water and drop different plastic spiders and popping bugs in to see just how they would wiggle, cutting off little sections of rubber legs with a tiny pair of scissors to see if that made any difference. I guess you could do that in the 1960s, when popping bugs were 25 cents. I saw a few in my local hoity-toity camping/fly-fishing store the other day for $2.50 apiece. At that price, I’d think twice about doing anything to them unless they’d already proven that they wouldn’t catch fish.
Bream came to mind the other day when I was messing around at the local municipal lake, ready to grill chicken with a couple of the guys who worked there. A father brought in a youngster, maybe 6 years old, with one of those little Snoopy or Dora The Explorer rods that came packed with the funny little bobbers, a couple of split shot and a few Aberdeen bronze hooks.
“Big B” sold the dad some red wigglers, and he and “Signal Caller” made a fuss over the kid before sending them out onto the little pier that sticks out about 100 yards off the lake’s bank. A couple of hours later, with us leaning back in our chairs, noting the over-full nature of our respective bellies, the dad and kid came back. They were all smiles. Another “first fish” had bit the dust.
August may be “dog days” to a lot of fishermen, a month when the heat drives you away from the lake on even the “cooler” afternoons. Bass are tough to catch; ditto speckled trout and a number of other fish from both the salty and the fresh. But bream, you can always count on. Every month during the summer, on the cue of the full moon, they crowd into the shallows to spawn, fanning out dish-shaped nests in big colonies. They’ll happily jump on any bait you drop in their vicinity.
Bream are a pedestrian fish in a passing-lane society. I, for one, am glad, because I went 25 years between speeding tickets at one point, and my fishing tends to be slow-lane, too. Lately, with my youngest heading off to a college up in mountains, I’ve been tutoring him on the fine points of the fly rod, so he can spend time when he should be studying drafting standing knee deep in a stream trying to catch a rainbow trout.
But he’ll never forget his first fish — that first bream — and the photo of him in a straw hat, holding it proudly, will stay in my album.
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