Bream: The Moon Fish
Posted on May 1, 2014 by bob in OffTheBeatenPath
The voice on the other end of the line answered on the fourth ring.
“This better be good!”
“Pardon?” I asked, perplexed.
“Someone better be dead or be dying for you to be bothering me right now,” he said.
Taken aback, I glanced at my watch; it was just four o’clock, a Tuesday in mid-May. Over the crackle of the cell phone I could make out two men talking, debating with great enthusiasm the merits of both wigglers and crickets. Without a clue as to how I should respond, I went into my pitch. Five words in I realized I had picked a very bad time to call a very powerful man whose help I needed.
“Son, I hate to cut you off but there’s a full moon tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got 200 crickets and two hours til’ dark, and my partner’s picked half a dozen titty bream off this bed since you’ve been jabbering.”
“Yes, uh, yes sir,” I stammered, “I just wanted to ask whether, I mean if you could consider …”
“Get the net!” I heard before the line went dead.
In politics, timing is everything. That which is possible today may not be so tomorrow, and that which may be possible tomorrow is most unlikely today. And, so it is with fishing the sunfish spawn. The dedicated watch their calendars, counting down the days until that first magical full moon of May, the official start of bream season. The bass and catfish too bide their time, innately knowing when the days get longer and both the water temperature and moon begin to rise, the table is being set for the annual summer smorgasbord in the shallows.
In some of the South’s more remote locales, that first full moon is heralded like the dove opener or the first college football kickoff. And for good reason. You’d be hard pressed to find another freshwater fish that bites as well on the bed as the bream, can match its pound-for-pound strength, or that tastes as good alongside a couple hush puppies hot from the grease and a mound of cole slaw.
No other activity so captures the essence of summertime than sitting on a bream bed pulling No. 8 skillet-sized fish, one after another, from a sunken stump with the moon rising over your shoulder, the occasional breeze catching the sweetness of a honeysuckle bloom. While it will be like this every full moon through September, just a few days off those prime hours each month, even in the same spot with the same bait, you’d be swatting skeeters and tossing back fingerlings.
Though we generically call them sunfish, “moon fish” seems a more fitting name, at least during the summer, since its patterns stir within these prolific fish the need to breed that drives them shallow in the first place. Like packs of scaled werewolves, they rise with the full moon from their offshore haunts, converging to fantail depressions into the sand or gravel bottom near shore to lay eggs.
In these spots, with little more than a cane pole, a can of worms and an upturned bucket for a seat, a man can in short order catch a neighborhood’s worth of “titty bream,” sunfish so large the only way to hold them is to press them against, well, you get the idea.
Some folks – like my friend – take their bream fishing mighty serious. Looking back on that ill-timed phone call, I should have watched the moon more closely, or better yet, offered to clean his fish.
Niko Corley spends his free time on the water or in the woods, and earned his charter boat license in 2012. He can be contacted at cootfootoutfitters@gmail.com.
