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.