My search for a big silver bream has brought me beyond Bridgwater to a small commercial fishery called Emerald Pool, in West Huntspill. I was acting on a bit of a hunch following reports of pleasure and match weights between 50-90lb made up of mostly skimmers, roach and "hybrids". My suspicions were soon confirmed when I swung in a small silver bream first cast, although I did later bank a couple of very nice roach/bream hybrids over 1lb.
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Emerald Pool is a lake of many features but also many, many fish. So many in fact that fishing to features seems pointless when all you need do is stir up a bit of competition in the surface layers. Typically, I spent the best part of an afternoon playing the numbers game, catching two or three fish every minute on a waggler set as shallow as twelve inches deep, only for the very best fish to make an appearance only when the light began to fade.
I had no preconceived plan to fish shallow, expecting that the largest fish would be found with a decent sized bait inert and pinned to the deck, but it is hard to get across quite how prolific this lake is. I spent the first three hours fishing right in front of my car, but the wind turned around making this unbearable, and after three hours of torment I concluded that enough was enough and moved to the other side of the pond.
It was when I started in my second swim at around half past one that my fortunes changed. I chucked in a couple of balls of groundbait laced with chopped worm and had a little tench and a few skimmers on the deck before I decided to come shallow. Thereafter I was catching skimmers and silver bream one-a-chuck, plus a trio of pretty fantail brown goldfish and a rogue carp or three. I chopped and changed hookbaits, between a piece of worm, casters and maggots but each bait caught both small and better quality fish. In fact nearly all the fish were quality, two or three to the pound being typical stamp.
I only had one roach all day, but that was a fish of easily 1lb, whilst the biggest silver bream I managed was 1lb 2oz. They are still on the lean side though so a return in the spring may be in order. The best bit of fortune was snagging up in a tree and losing the 4BB waggler I started on. I then took the opportunity to set up again with a short 2BB model, allowing me to fish shallower than I had before, which seemed to bring larger fish. I got through a pint and a half of caster in total.
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