Chumming Black Bream
Early in May I spent five days at Greame Pullen's place using the house as a base to radiate out from all over Hampshire, Wiltshire and Sussex, gathering in podcast interviews and video footage for the website, and, weather permitting, hoping to get in a couple of days afloat to the east of the Isle of Wight. Unfortunately, for the first few days at least, the weather was dire. Dare I say it was almost like being back home in Lancashire. So we crammed in the interviews, one of which was with the fishery staff at the world famous big Trout stalking water of Avington. Getting out to sea looked like it just simply wasn't going to happen. Then on the Friday when I was scheduled to drive home to be at Blackpool airport the following evening to collect the wife, the weather suddenly took a turn for the better. What a dilemma. But in the end it was no content. So I stayed over, pushed my luck until the very last minute, then sped off home just making it back with 10 minutes to spare before the plane touched down.
At Avington, the minimum stocking size is around 5 pounds, with plenty of nice doubles to go around. Fishery staff also help prepare customers fish for home, which along with the inevitable fatalities both from the lake as well as the fish farm, means a lot of Trout associated waste to get rid of on an ongoing basis. Fortunately for them, and for Graeme, Avington isn't that far from the Pullen residence. So forays with big plastic buckets by Graeme to the fishery are a regular occurrence over the summer months. The beauty of Trout, other than their pre-trip availability, is their huge oil content care of the high protein pellets they are fed. Much more oil than you would get from any species of wild fish, including Mackerel. The main reason for collecting and freezing down huge volumes of Rainbow Trout guts and carcases is for Porbeagle Shark fishing off the North Cornish Coast, and in that regard Graeme (and myself) have enjoyed some good results. But Sharks aren't the only species likely to respond to a good chum trail with hook baits placed along its path. More species than most anglers might imagine will be drawn in. And right up there on that list is the Black Bream, for which the Sussex Coast is rightly renowned.
There are two particularly important things which need to be said here on the subject of chum. The first is that you are not trying to feed the fish, but merely to draw them in and play on their provoked hunger by placing hook baits on the down tide side of the chum source. The other equally important factor is to carefully place that chum source where the fish are feeding, in this case for Bream hard on the bottom. Some anglers would probably tie it to the anchor. But for a couple of very good reasons that is not such a good idea. What if, as often happens, a breeze suddenly gets up that is blowing at an angle across the flow of the tide which as the run eases, allows the boat to be pushed sideways off the line of the tide. The bag attached to the anchor will continue to work attracting fish back to the trails source. The problem is that in getting there, they will no longer be swimming under the boat and finding the baits. So the chum bag is then actually doing the opposite of what it was put there to do by drawing fish away from rather than attracting them ro the baits.
Just to demonstrate both how effective chum can be for Bream (and other fish), and how ineffective it would be tied to the anchor, every time Graeme pulled the bag up on its own heavily weighted rope tied to the side of the boat to keep it working under the hull, re-filled it, then sent it back down, within minutes we would be into another flurry of Bream activity which would then slowly wane away as the chum got washed out of the bag. Topping the bag up like that would be impossible when attached to the anchor, in addition to which there is the problem with wind across the tide as previously mentioned. On a straight up and down narrow diameter 'rope' attached to the boat to help cut the tide, the source of the slick is always uptide of the hook baits regardless of whatever else might happen. But don't forget about it and start heading for home later or you'll have to find a way of getting it from around the prop. And using the bag in that way, we quite literally cleaned up.
Talking with other people who were out nearby and also fishing for Black Bream, the value of the chum bag became even more apparent. Bream for whatever reason, had been especially scarce that day. In fact, quite a number of boats on exactly the same ground had completely blanked. Yet we were probably doing nothing different to anyone else other than the chum. Our tactical approach was simplicity itself. We both fished ultra light fixed spool outfits with single hook mono droppers fashioned from a blood loop opened up to tie on a size 2 hook with a lead at the very bottom of the trace. Bait was tiny slivers of Calamari Squid. That's it. The smaller the baits and hooks, the less the fish mess about nibbling them down to takeable size, and the quicker you can hit them. But they have to be there first both to see and to want the baits, which is where the chum comes in. Whether or not any of the other boats also had chum down is difficult to say. Even if they had, I'll wager they hadn't gone to the same degree of trouble Graeme had with the Trout guts and regular top ups every half hour or so throughout the day.
Finally last day. Had to go. Succumbed to pressure.