Big Bream at Shearwater Lake

When we fished at Gasper Lake, we became aware of a much bigger lake feeding into it. We discovered that the lake belonged to the Shearwater Estate. We talked to anglers along the bank and were told that they sold day tickets in the tackle shop at Warminster or you could start fishing and the gamekeeper would sell you a ticket on the bank.

 Obviously, they had started doing what the Longleat Estate had started and using the angling revenue to help the costs of the upkeep of the estate. The lake itself was huge, being over half a mile in length and several hundred yards wide at its widest. The lake was being used by both anglers and the local yacht club and was a really great asset to the community around Warminster. The only arguments that used to break out were between the odd canoeist or windsurfer and the anglers who were trying to ledger at long distance.

 

 It could get a bit hairy at times, but I never saw any serious stuff happen. Once each of the different fraternities learned to respect and play together things weren’t too bad. The huge lake was surrounded by dense forest and was very good for cyclists and walkers, who enjoyed the environment. It made for a good walk on a Sunday after lunch, with many walkers along the path.

They seemed to enjoy watching the anglers and other water users. On misty damp days it took on the appearance of pre-historic times and you might expect a monster from the deep to surface in the middle of the lake at any time. It looked really stunning, especially in the early mornings and late evenings when the sun rose and set.

Sometimes, it was a bit of a nuisance having person after person asking you “how you are doing”, and “have you caught anything”. I did think about putting a little sign up just behind me saying “No, I haven’t caught anything and I don’t want to talk about it, so good day to you”. I chickened out though and just put up with it. If you did catch fish it was not long before a crowd stood behind you and started cheering every time you hooked into one.

This would push the shoals further out and you would then have to cast further for your bites. Never the less it was a pleasure to fish the stunning place.  My friends and I used to favour the dam wall when fishing there. The water was up to 14ft deep along the wall and this made float fishing on the bottom quite difficult. Fortunately, we found a method of catching in mid water at about 8 feet. The lake itself tended to shallow up to about 8ft half way up to only 4 foot at the top end of the lake. 

On really warm summer days the tench and bream would move up into this shallower water and good bags of 50 to 60lb of fish could be caught.

As the season moved towards Autumn, the deeper water on the dam wall really came into its own. Shoals of big bream to 5lb patrolled the area and also good roach and tench. The more lazy anglers would switch to the ledger for more easy fishing, but once mastered the float was much better. When windy, the dam wall could not be bettered because both sides of the lake except for the right corner bay would get very choppy and a fierce undertow would make holding bottom with a float just about impossible if you fished more than 20 feet out. The little bay in the right corner, however, had a large lily pad area which served as a good cover for fish and which was much calmer than the rest of the water which soon became choppy.  When windy it tended to blow from behind you on the dam wall. This gave you fairly calm water in front of you which made detecting bites much easier.

 

Some anglers would swear by fishing on the bottom as the big bream were the target. Most fished with sweet corn, maggots or casters.  On our first visit we decided to tackle the dam wall with sliding floats. Expecting to catch fairly good sized bream as we had been told, we laid a bed of ground bait laced with pinkies and casters. About 8 large handfuls which were squeezed very tightly to hold together until it got to the lower depths close to the bottom. We fished with two or three maggots on a size 16 hook.  

What we found was that after a  couple of hours the bites got fewer and far between. We had 4 or 5 bream each to about 4lb in weight. The bites we did get had us striking thin area and we could not make any contact with them. We tried putting more ground bait in but it made no difference. We could not buy a fish. In desperation I decided to come up to about half depth at 8 feet. Fishing on maggot I caught a few nice roach, but no big bream. The only other option I could think of was to change bait, so I tried various sizes of pieces of bread flake. My first bite came on a piece the size of a 50 pence piece.

 As I struck into a heavy fish I realised that either the continual baiting had caused the bream to actually come up into the higher layers or that they were seeking the warmer thermal layers to feed. It was a bigger specimen around the 5lb mark.

 

I was gobsmacked because I had to admit that I genuinely believed that bream where bottom feeders only. That is what all the text books tell you, so catching them in mid water went against all that. I had to accept the new evidence as continued to catch bream after bream at mid-water levels. Imagine the scene with passer’s by cheering every fish catch. Some of the non anglers had never seen big fish like that being caught one after the other and quite a crowd gathered behind us. It was like playing to a gallery, something I quite enjoyed.  Again we suffered after that, the dam wall was taken up every time we went back.

It was quite a race each time to claim swims as they only opened the gates at about 7.30am and no one was allowed to fish before that time. The fishery also closed at dusk and no night fishing was allowed. We had bags up to around 80lb each and I have never experienced big bream fishing like that before or since. These days bream go much bigger, but forty years ago they were big for that time. I heard that a few years later they introduced a large head of carp at about 6 ounces size.

The pole began to be the method in deep water and the carp gradually took over from the bream along the dam wall. They were mostly the fish you hooked when fishing there after that. A bit of a pity, because that sort of fishing was too easy. Saying that, those carp are probably double figures these days, but again, I am not sure that I want to find out. 

What size the bream go I couldn’t imagine. I will continue to remember how it was in the seventies and early eighties because the capture of illusive fish which fed in the mid-depths against all known information of the time gave me far more satisfaction than the easy pole fishing which took over.