MEGA BREAM trip report

I just got back from fishing the Australian MEGA BREAM tournament held at the very famous Forster in NSW.

Before I go on I’d really like to thank Okuma and Bream Master.com for sponsoring my trip over there. I’d also like to thank Ian Miller for supplying me with two of the best rods I’ve ever had the pleasure of using for the weekend. And lastly but not least Dave W for inviting me over to fish with him.

The event was a huge success and plenty of fish were caught, Chris Wright got a 1.99 kilo horse but there was a few bream over 1.5 caught including a few around 1.7 / 1.8ish that normally would take the big bream honors at any other event.

I can see why Forster is so loved by anglers on the east coast, it’s an amazing place, very unforgiving and the place and the bream are brutal on gear. It’s bloody huge like you can run for miles but in that area there is so much structure like racks and other gear to fish that its not funny.

Most of the bottom end of the system is shallow so when the tide runs in and out it really hammers, like you can’t hold station in some places with a kota. It changes very fast too, like the water goes from murky to ultra, ultra, ultra clear when the tide comes in, it changes completely in like an hour. From the start to the end of the run out it took about two hours and it was like fishing a completely different system.

Your gear has to be first class just to land small bream and I bent or ruined a jig or a treble on about 99% on all the fish I caught. It’s amazing how hard even a legal size bream pulls and anyone who says that blacks pull harder has never caught one of these bad boys. Compared to those bream our bream here are pussies, dead set, even the undersize ones we caught pull hard. Our fish still go all right and are no push over but man those bream are brutal on gear. WA guys think like kilo skippy, that’s about what a 25cm is like.

Dave and I had a pretty good three days and we estimate that we caught over 100 fish for the trip, the by-catch was big skippy, dusky flathead, whiting, flounder and pike.

We caught on a few different lures like, 3” bass minnows, 2” bass minnows, Yamamoto Ika’s, Eyeball tails, Scorp 52’s and the highlight which was throwing surface fizzers.

The surface fizzers are actually a very viable way of getting fish. Once the tides out the racks are out of the water and most stuff is shallow so you can through the fizzers over the racks and or weed beds and we did get fish on them. We got bulk hits on them and I scored some pics of a bream taking one, see below.

We caught all of our fish on the flats and while we knew we may not get the big ones our plan was that we thought 10 would at least get us up there and to come 8th yesterday in such a classy field is an awesome feeling. We got 17 bream over the two days and it was a real team effort so Dave and I are really happy with how we went.

First pic is the Ecogear boat, I loved the paint job, nice one Tony.

The Metcalfe's insane Quantam boat, it's got a 120HP I think and it's bloody quick!

Tim the bream working the washboards on racks next to the flats we fished

Mt first Forster bream on the pre-fish day, not huge but hey it popped the cherry, the plastic is an eyeball tail

I got a few nice whiting like this one

Eastern Yellow Fin on a Scorp 52 brown trout on the flats

On the pre-fish day Dave and I stopped to talk to these two old local dudes who were fishing inside a lease. We talked to them about fishing for about half an hour and I tell you what they had life sussed out.

They told Dave and I that they fish mondays, play golf on tuesdays, play bowls on wens, thursdays is spent with the misses and they fish fri, sat, sun and mondays. If you could ask for just one thing out of life I'd ask to be in their shoes when I'm 70 odd.

While we are talking to them bream start busting up on the surface smacking baitfish. They were going sick and baitfish were going mad all over the top of the racks.

Dave busts out the Taylor Made surafce fizzer we had been catching bream on earlier and I grabbed my camera, I was a fair way back and I zoomed right in so the quality isnt great but good enough to tell, this is Dave's fizzer coming back....

Then bang a bream smacks it! I was just pumping shots (took like 14 on one retrive) and got the bream hitting it

close up of the same one above

Gotta love bream on surface fizzers! The best one was the Taylor Made one you can see here

This is the flats we fished at the end of the run out tide. You can see it's kinda murky

[Stephen H]

wow!!

looks like you had a pretty amazing time over there.

The same spot less than an hour later when the tide starts to run in. Now I know what Tim Morgan meant when he said that he followed the colour change up at Forsters last year!

In the murky water they are resonably easy to get, once it runs in hard they are very spooky. We caught all our fish on looooong casts fishing 1/32 oz jigs, I used 1/16th maybe once or twice I think and went back to 1/32's. Dave fished 4lb leaders all weekend and never changed once, I fished 6lb on the flats, ultra finese in clear water but it got us 17 fish