Mostly they can just be persuaded in on roach kit, but in the spring, they sometimes leap, which can be a bit of a shock. Especially when you hook them in eight feet of water and they can get a real run-up.
Every now and then you meet a "no surrender" one; **** Walker gives an account of one in "No Need to Lie", and for years, my best bream was a 5lb 9 oz tidal Thames fish which must have been training with the barbel, 'cos it just would not come off the bottom. Once it had given up running around, it just plodded upstream and down again, about a rod's length each way, with the rod hooped and line singing for what seemed like ages. I was expecting a decent carp, and almost joined it in the river when I saw what I was actually playing.
On reflection, it still is my "best" bream, though my biggest is now around 9.5lb.
Bill Taylor, who wrote "The Competent Angler" and had loads of huge bream bags around Oxford, reckoned that when you hooked one of these, that was your last bream of the day, and wondered if they were the "Boss" fish of the shoal, without whose leadership the rest would clear off sharpish.
---------- Post added at 11:45 ---------- Previous post was at 11:37 ----------
P.S. If a shoal of fun-sized bream turn up in your roach swim, just a couple of rods out, try to unhook them in the water. If you can do this without any fuss, they tend to swim off again merely puzzled, and not shoot through the shoal in an I-have-seen-the-world-above-and-it's-horrid panic, taking the rest with them.
Of course, only try this if you want to catch a few more...
