bream for bait

[Dennis Morgan]

bream makes a great bait for the striper, easy to catch around docks and landing. some will live longer than a blue back in the hot weather

[Dino]

Yeah they do work, you don't hear people talk about using them as much any more but old timers use to say their secret bait was warmouths and bream is what they were talking about. If you get out there fishing with them let us know how you do.
-Dino

[Ginhouse]

How exactly do you hook the bream to keep it alive and stay on the hook? I recently moved to the lake near Toccoa ga and have to learn to fish, lol.

[Joe D.]

How exactly do you hook the bream to keep it alive and stay on the hook? I recently moved to the lake near Toccoa ga and have to learn to fish, lol.

Here is some advice based on my experience.
I hook the live bream through the back just below the backside of the dorsal fin. The key to hooking up is to make sure your using a propperly sized hook.
If you want to try circle hooks, I would suggest gamakatsu octopus circle hooks and you will not even really even need to set the hook. If you like to set the hook, try the eagle claw kahle hook. If you start missing fish one thing you want to pay attention to is what kind of witness/bite marks are on the bait.
If you find there are two or three slim stripes on the bait with scales stripped off I would suspect it may have been hit by a Gar, actually hooking or landing one of them is tough due to their boney mouth and sharp teeth. If your bait was grabbed just below the hook and scaled completely or in a wide band it's typically a small fish that couldn't engulf the bait or you may have just set the hook early, in this case try using a smaller bait and wait longer before setting the hook.
Hope this helps.

-Joe D. (AKA Dino)