Big River Bream Adventure

The River Lune is not well known as a coarse fishery, but ask any salmon angler about the game fishing on the Lune and he’ll tell you he’d sell his grandmother for a beat on it’s upper reaches. However, the bottom two-mile section, that’s the section upstream from the weir on the outskirts of Lancaster to the weir at Halton, is an excellent coarse fishery, especially when we are talking big bream.

This section of the river, as far up as the motorway bridge, has been industrialised on it’s south bank for over 200 years. Although there are still some industries left they do not deplete the beauty of this part of the river and much has been done to remove old industrial eyesores. The railway which ran between the river and the adjacent factories has now gone and in its place is a superb cycle track.

The Lansil Angling Club

I first came across the river in the late seventies when I moved to the Yorkshire Dales for the Potholing. At first I assumed that there was no coarse fishing in the area and therefore took up fly-fishing. After a while a young lad joined the company I was working for and told me about the Lansil Angling Club.

Lansil was a major manufacturer in the City of Lancaster and owned land along the River Lune – thank God for the working class man and the factory social clubs. Needless to say I joined the club and although I did not take my fishing very seriously during my caving phase, I can remember catching some excellent bags of dace…….. and I’m talking 1 lb plus dace not being uncommon. But most of all I remember the tales of the 4lb roach and 200lb bags of bream, with some of the bream being in excess of 7lb.

7lb bream or bust!

From being a young lad who fished the mill lodges and polluted rivers around Accrington a 7lb bream somehow got stuck in my mind as being the fish I had to catch. As I grew up I, for whatever reason, became obsessed by that magical 7lb figure. I passed through my caving phase and into my horse riding phase and I had even less time to fish. After many good times and adventures with my horses I came back to fishing, as we all seem to do, and still stuck in my mind was that 7lb bream, and so began my Big River Bream Adventure.

In the first year of the new millennium I once again joined the Lansil Angling Club and renewed most of my now very old fishing gear, the best buy being a John Wilson Avon rod. My first few trips to the river were to say the least very disappointing; maybe I expected too much, maybe it was the foul weather we had towards the backend of the year, but it was also because the river had changed.

Gone had all the huge shoals of dace, and the lads told me the big roach just disappeared overnight after the devastating salmon disease. And no more 200lb bags of bream.

Then I met the man who knew about the very big bream.

No longer a dream

Gordon Brakewell is the club secretary and he told me where the big bream shoaled up in the winter and how to go about catching them. When he told me that they went up to 12lb I was absolutely gob-smacked and even when he said there would be many a blank session, that 7lb bream was no longer just a dream. I now sought out other anglers and questioned them about the bream and they came back with the same tales about big winter bream.

On the 17th of February 2001 at 17:00hrs at the age of 56 I landed a 9lb river bream.

And so started the adventure

At the start of 2001 almost all of the northwest was affected by the foot-and-mouth disease and although one of the first outbreaks was in Halton, near the top section of the Lansil stretch, the club members only suffered a month’s lay-off, plus the close season. So the first hour of new season saw Matt Dent and myself on the banks of the River Lune, and so started our big river bream adventure.

I use the word adventure because it best fits the way I felt about tackling the River Lune, that particular 1 1/2 miles of river, varying from 60 metres wide at the top end to over 100 metres wide at the bottom limit of the Lansil stretch. It averages about 3 metres deep with holes up to 7 to 8 metres.

Unfortunately, along with another keen soul, we all blanked that first night, but a partnership developed between Matt and myself and plans were made. We talked about looking at the river as a whole and not just sitting it out and hitting the honey-pot pegs. We wanted to know how big the shoal was; was there more than one shoal and what was the extent of the patrol routes? We planned per-baiting campaigns and talked about making contacts with old and existing anglers about where they had caught fish.

A casual conversation was the key

Without rambling on about the hours spent feature-finding and the many breamless sessions on the lower sections of the river, most of which were long solo night sessions, we eventually moved back up to the section of river above the motorway bridge where we know the bream to be. Just one word however about the bottom section; it does contain some excellent hybrids from 3lb up to 6lb and they fight much better than the bream. On one such solo night session, after a horrendous thunderstorm, Matt landed five excellent hybrids taken on sweet corn and bread.

“Its nice to talk” but even better to listen. From a casual conversation with a guy in the car park one day, who’d just finished a day’s session on the pole, I found out that the bream come very close into the bank, later also to be confirmed by salmon anglers. Saturday 7th July saw my first bream (7lbs) of the session, and yes, it was caught early in the morning from close in and not from one of the hot spots. Six sessions later, 26th August at 2 o’ clock in the morning, I hit two big ones from the same spot, 11lbs and 10lb-3oz. From then on the bream came one or two at a time, steadily, up to December.

Big catch on corn

During the first cold spell at the end of December I moved up into the winter holding area and eventually put together a fine bag of big river bream; 7lb-8oz, 9lb-4oz, 7lb-2oz, 6lb, 8lb-15oz and 10lb-10oz. All but one came to 3 grains of sweet corn on a size 8 barb-less hook fished on the swim-feeder with crumb/layers mash/hemp/corn groundbait, wetted with the water from the hemp and molasses. Couldn’t have wished for a better Christmas present.

And the future?

Well, the big bream are not going to last forever, but they may get a wee bit bigger before they disappear. One of 12lbs is the largest I’ve heard caught, so a bit more of the same in 2002 would be nice. However, I’m convinced that there’s a lot more to the bottom section of this river and I’m quite looking forward to a summer of exploring.

And then of course there’s the legend of the 5lb perch that a salmon angler took home for his tea, not to mention the 30lb-plus pike………