How to stop catching bream

As avid carp fishermen, we understand the struggle and frustration when fishing bream infested waters. Nuisance fish are so heavily stocked in British lakes and it leaves us anglers pulling our hair out. However, there are a few ways you can overcome this problem:

• Bigger baits
• Stop using pellets
• Find a new water

BIG Baits

One of the easiest solutions to stop bream is to use larger baits, they won’t be able to fit 20mm baits in their mouths so you won’t catch any!

We’re not recommending that you use enormous Gob-stopper boilies but we would defiantly scale up our baits when fishing bream infested waters.

You have to find the right size hook-bait, you don’t want it to be so big that not even the carp can get their mouths around it but you don’t want it to be so small that the bream will get it.

As well as increasing the size of your hook-bait, it may also be worth considering to up the size of your actual hooks as well.

However, this does also depend on the size of the fish you’re going to be catching but it is another precautionary measure you can take to get rid of those bream!

If there are seriously big fish present in the lake you’re fishing you can even bump up your baits to enormous 24mm boilies which will be a guaranteed bream proof bait.

However, this does also mean that you’re likely to miss smaller carp as they won’t even be able to fit the boilie in their mouths.

Stay away from pellets!

The last bait we recommend using in water with a lot of nuisance fish is pellets. The bream are drawn to them like a moth is to moonlight.

You’ll find yourself being absolutely peppered with these fish and you won’t be able to do anything about it if you are fishing with pellets.

Don’t even use them in your ground-baits when fishing in waters with a lot of bream, you want to keep them out of your swim and allow the carp to get there.

The same thing applies for baits like corn, avoid using a single grain on a hair, it’s worth squeezing on three or four and that way the bream are much less likely to get to your hook-bait.

Unfortunately for many carp anglers, we can’t incorporate pellets into out bait mixes on these waters so a great alternative is to use pastes.

Wrapping up your boilie in a paste is an awesome trick that we like to use, pastes are usually quite slow break-down and they also prevent the bream from getting to your boilies.

Find a new water

If you really aren’t having any success at your current water because of the bream it may be worth considering changing the lake your fishing.

When we first started angling (nearly 10 years ago) we were fishing a small canal near our house and we just were getting hit by bream after bream and we were sick and tired of catching them, not to mention the fact they are incredibly slimy!

If you’ve ever held a carp and you think their bad, just wait till you touch a bream, they are slippery, slimy and stink.

Anyway, we decided to abandon our little canal and venture a little further to a local carp fishery and we were sure enough having much more success with the same techniques we were using back at the canal.

Although there are often amazing carp in these bream infested waters, it usually just worth switching to somewhere else where you don’t have to take so many precautions when fishing.