[Mrs Graybeard]

GB and I have gone bream fishing several times over the years and I really enjoy catching them when I am not tangled up in a tree. It seems that if there is a tree near by I am going to find it.
GB told me that if I wanted to go fishing with him I would have to put my own bait on my hook so I did. When I lose a hook I had to learn how to replace it so I have my own tackle box with everything I need in it.

 

[Lead pot]

Hi-Mrs.GB,I have to ask,are brem the fish I call sheepheads?the fish I call sheepheads are silvery blue on the back and look like carp.Lp.

 

[wildman]

How 'bout them Bluegills. I go fishing with my father-in-law every summer on his pond in Northern Alabama and have a blast catching those little rascals. Bring out the wiggle worms and catch a whole bucket of em. You've got to have a small hook, let them take that bobber under a bit, and set em. Chop off the heads, gut em, scale em, batter, and deep fry with the skins on. Throw in some hushpuppies, slaw, fresh watermelon, and iced tea - yum, yum. On a good day, add homemade vanilla ice cream and homemade apple pie! Summer days just don't get much better than that.

 

[flatlander]

My favorite way to catch the big "bull" 'gills is on a 4 wt fly rod. They will usually slam a wooly bugger or even a popper at sunup/sundown. Nothing more fun than getting a whole basket of these little "Kansas trout". Good eating, too. Come on, springtime! Only about 3 months to go.

 

[rwng]

If I run out of worm pieces I'll always get 'em with small crickets. I always have my popsicle stick handy, cause they like the hooks too. :?

 

[rwng]

Lead pot, they are pan fish. Wildman sounds like a great southern afternoon.

 

[savageT]

Mrs. GB,

I think up here in New York us dang yankees refers to those bream as "bluegills"?????

 

[Graybeard]

Here in the south Bream or Brim as it is sometimes spelled also is a generic name for a variety of pan size fish. Bluegill is certainly one of them. So are redear, stump knockers, green sunfish, shell crackers and many others. Most are really in the sunfish family I believe.

The way me and Mrs. GB usually do it is to go to a mountain watershed lake and put in a boat. We move around the edges and other cover mostly using ultra light spinning or spin casting rods and light lines. We use redworms or wrigglers most often but I have some catalpa trees planted and there ain't no better bait than catalpa worms for bream or catfish. Some times we'll use crickets but worms are more common for us.

We might catch most anything that is in the lake this way. Each trip we'll catch a few small bass and sometimes a catfish in addition to the bream.

Bream is my favorite fish to eat. As was already mentioned. Scale them, gut them, cut off the heads, batter them and deep fry in oil. Serve them with hush puppies and cole slaw and it don't get no better. Reckon catfish followed by crappie are my other favorite fish to eat. Don't really care for the taste of bass so don't target them.

GB

 

[Lead pot]

I think we are talking about the same fish what I call sheepheads.I got out the fish book and looked it up,they look the same.
GB when I'm on the river I just gut them wrap them in foil and throw them in the hot campfire coals. They are a little on the oily side but they have a good flavor.LP

 

[Hawgcaller]

Ya dun gon n dun it now!!!!!!

Yall start talkin like that and I'm gonna turn this thang off, tune up the evinrude, tar the holes in the boat, dig sum wurms, an git with the program. I'ma salivatin' on the key board already. And I thought I was alone in the worship of the "Almight Bream and Goggle Eye. I shore am glad to hear alla yin's bout that.

See ya

LD

 

[myronman3]

bream....

are most definately not sheephead. a sheephead is a freshwater drum. how anyone who has seen a fish can mistake a bluegill (bream) for a sheephead is beyond me. my favorite recipe for sheephead- throw 'em on the bank for the flies. bluegills are my favorite fish. fish em out of my kayak in these northern remote lakes. gotta love em. the small town i live in is the bluegill capitol of wisconsin. but dont bother coming here boys; the fishing really sucks!!! :-D

 

[Daveinthebush]

Try these..

An ice fishing jig under a bobber with a grub as bait. Clean hands!

Small Power grubbs on same size hooks under a bobber.

Small spinner with a power grub tail on a small hook.

Small minnows under a bobber on a hook with a small split shot about 12" up to keep the minnow down.

 

[Gatofeo]

Found a pond here in the remote Utah desert that is very small. Also loaded with bluegills.
Fished for them Jan. 2 and had a ball. I had a hard time setting the hook, all they wanted to do is nibble the corn off my hook. But finally landed three small bluegills in two hours of fishing. Must have had over a hundred strikes or nibbles, though.
I threw the small ones back, hoping for bigger fish. No deal. But it was fun to wet a line and enjoy the sun.
I'm going back with my 4-man raft. Hope to get away from the bank a bit, in search of bigger fish.
I get serious when I fish for Rainbow trout at my cabin in British Columbia, but this kind of fishing is pure relaxation .... ahhhhhhhhhhh ...

 

[Lead pot]

Myronman3>schucks I never noed a blue gill was called a brem didnt know there scientific name.I thought they were a sunfish or a blue gill.I saw the saltwater brem in the book ,the sheep head looked just like it,and they dont tast to bad.Heck when I'm out walking arround and my pack runes outa food I would even eat a boney bog fish if I had to.Dont know the proper name for a dog fish neather.Happy paddeling Myronman. Lp.

 

[myronman3]

god bless you..

if you found a use for those boney things. i personally can not stand to eat fish if there is even one bone in it. needless to say i fillet my own as it is really hard to trust anyone else to do it right. i can not say much about saltwater fish; as i dont live anywhere near the ocean. swam in the atlantic a few times though. nice chatting folks; gotta run.

 

[rockbilly]

Back in the 50s and 60s we use to catch bream larger than my hand down in Miss. and La. I even seen one just out of Alexandria, La that weighed almost 4 pounds. My bait of choice was black roaches. Bait houses use to sell them. I made an attempt to raise them one time, had em in a 5 gal buckets with torn paper on the bottom, throw in a few tater pealings and sprinkle a little water on them from time to time and they produced like crazy. Free fish bait and plenty of them big ole bream to be caught, life don't get any better. But all **** broke loose one day. My old rabbit dog turned the cans over, we had roaches from one end of the house to the other. I thought my wife would kill me.

I have been around the world, but have never found ANY fish that eats better than a bream, beautiful fine grained white meat, it's almost sweet. We scaled them, took the head off, guts out, washed them and cooked them whole. Pull the top fin and the bottom fin and two big slabs of bone free meat fall on the plate. Darn, I sure wish I had a big mess of bream now. Anybody got 45-50 they can spare?

 

[DPRinks]

Bream and sunfish

Gentlemen;
The Bream is a European and Asian carp.
The perch family has a number of members in North America, the Walleye and the Yellow Perch are the catchable members of the family, several small perch are common in the South, most less than 6" long and found only in a minnow seine or minnow trap, most of them are called 'Darters".
Most of the fish called perch or bream in the South are sunfish, even the Large Mouth , Small Mouth and Spotted Bass are sunfish.
The Rio Grande Perch , found over about 1/2 of Texas is even more misnamed, it is a chinchlid, a large family of fishes in Mexico , Central and South America.
A stray fish found in the Rio Grande and some of it's tributaries, is the Dormilon, a fish that looks like a cross between a Large Mouth Bass and a Toad Fish from salt water, but green top, white bottom a mouth full of big teath and scales"the Toad Fish has no scales", it is a good fighter and good eating, I have only caught 10-15 of them below the dam at Falcon Reservoir
Don Rinks

 

[volshooter]

Here in Tennessee just about any pan fish between Coosa bass (redeyes) and trout are lumped into the name "bulegill" , covers everything from redear sunfish to warmouths. The are easy to catch and very tasty. Personally I can take a doz night crawlers, small long shank hook and a weighted cork float and catch a 5 gallon bucket full of the tasty fish. I place the "bluegill" type fish just behind Sauger and Crappie in taste with catfish and small mouth rounding up my top eaters. Sauger you got to fish hard and deep with a min. 14.5 inch size, crappie you have to hunt for them and pert near wipe out the whole hole, catfish like to bits during my sleep time and fishing is fun but slow, smallmouth is very fine fishing on our rivers and lots of fun....but I can catch my favorite bluegill in just about any water, deep or in the weeds as long as it's wet.

Bless the bluegill for it has turned many young kids into fisherman and been table fare for most of us.

Rick 8)

 

[BillP]

Filets or dressed ?

Here in MN there is always a big dispute between those who filet their gills and those who clean them whole. Some folks just don't like skin on their fish or bones in them. Others, like myself, don't like the "fish chips" you get when you filet a sunfish. The filet folks tend to be into battering them up while those of us who leave the bones in tend toward lighter coatings. When I clean them, I cut along each side of the top and bottom fins and then pull the fins out with a pliers. That way when cooked you just slide a fork in along the spine and pull all the meat off one side at a time. When I cook them on a grill, I like to leave the fins on because they stay together better.

 

[John]

Those brim or whatever ya call em, we just call perch around here. I know "our" perch ain't the same as the yankees catch under the ice, but that's just what we call em.

I use em for flathead bait, and catch em on ultralite by the hundreds when I'm limblining. I don't like messin with live bait when I'm fishin fer bait, so I use Berkley Power Wigglers, they look like little maggots that are strung together like link sausage.

Put a power wiggler on a 64th oz. jig head and hang it under a Thill 2 1/2inch balsawood float, and you can catch maybe a dozen on one little rubber maggot before the fish tear it up so much that you have to replace it.

About those saltwater sheepsheads....they are pretty good, I've eaten em.