Bream brawl!

Pugnacious sunfish restore joy to summer fishing

This file photo shows a bream caught in DeGray Lake.
This file photo shows a bream caught in DeGray Lake.

I met a man at a bait store in Hot Springs last week that was buying a large quantity of crickets.

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Bluegills bite when other fish do not, which makes them excellent quarry for youngsters and beginners.

"Look's like somebody's going bream fishing," I said.

That started a long conversation about hot-weather bream fishing, which is peaking right now as bream complete a spawning cycle on a waning full moon.

"The ones I'm catching will cover your hand," the fellow said.

He fishes exclusively on Lake Hamilton, but you can catch bream on any lake in Arkansas right now, including Lake Maumelle, where Mark Hedrick of Little Rock caught half a cooler full last week.

The great thing about bream fishing is that it is simple, which makes it a great way to fish with youngsters. There are no specialty knots to tie and no complicated rigs or techniques. If you can find bream, you can catch them with crickets, worms and grasshoppers.

If you prefer artificial bait, summer is a great time to catch bream with inline spinnerbaits, like Mepps Aglias, Beetle Spins or tiny jigs with plastic tube baits.

Fly fishermen can catch them with popping bugs and nymphs.

Bream is a generic term used to identify several species of panfish. Anglers mostly pursue bluegills, but the family also includes redear sunfish (shellcrackers), longear sunfish (pumpkinseeds) and green sunfish. All of them are aggressive, territorial and opportunistic, so it doesn't require a high level of skill to catch them.

The key is to find them, and that's not as easy in the summer as in the spring, when they spawn near the bank on saucer-shaped beds that you can easily see without sunglasses.

In mid and late summer, bluegills spawn much deeper, where the water temperature is much cooler than near the surface. You'll find that about 20 feet deep on clear highland reservoirs.

On a sonar graph, schools of bluegills look like big balls, but you don't need sonar to find deep spawning beds. You can set a slider rig for 17-20 feet.

A slider rig consists of a long-shanked hook and a 1/8- to 1/4-ounce weight, a Thill bobber and a bobber stopper. A bobber stopper is a small piece of string or a small plastic plug that attaches to your line. It prevents a bobber from sliding past the stopper.

If the water is too shallow, the bobber will rest on its side because the bait will be on the bottom. When the water is deep enough for the bait to suspend over the bottom, the bobber will stand upright.

You can also fish live bait on a tight line without a bobber. If the bait hits the bottom, your line will rest on the water's surface. If it suspends over the bottom, the line will remain tight. A few inches off the bottom is the sweet spot for strikes.

The biggest bream are always near the bottom. The fish get smaller as you ascend the water column. If you use too light a weight, small fish will snatch a slow-falling bait before it reaches the big fish. If that happens consistently, add more weight to make the bait fall faster.

You can enjoy swift action of this sort in the deep coves of Ouachita, DeGray, Beaver, Norfork and Bull Shoals lakes. You also can catch bream off points, but wind makes it harder to keep your boat on station. Slow trolling is sometimes a good way to catch bream in deep, open water.

In shallow lakes, where there is no cool water in summer, bream seek shade. You can catch them on crickets and waxworms next to fallen timber or on the shady sides of standing timber.

Lily pads are great refuges for bream, but they are hard to fish. It can be challenging to get a bait into water between pads, but it's even more challenging to get a brawling bluegill out of lily pads on 2- to 4-pound test line.

Big largemouth bass lurk under lily pads, too. A giant bass can't resist attacking a frantic bluegill, and light line is no match for such an adversary.

Longear sunfish and green sunfish are common in our rivers and streams. They are always fun to catch, they can save a day when bass won't bite, and they are always willing to give a child a thrill.

The longear sunfish is the prettiest of all North American freshwater fish. They'll bite crickets and waxworms, but they'll also take tiny tube jigs, tiny inline spinners and small crawdads, like the Rebel Crickhopper and Rebel Crawdad.

Green sunfish act more like bass. They are more solitary and relate to thick cover more than other bream. They hit hard and fight hard.

If you don't feel like it's worth fighting the heat to catch two or three bass today, a good bream brawl will restore your joy for summer fishing.

Sports on 07/24/2016

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