Hey Guys,

This is my first post here, but I hope to be a regular.

I grew up bream fishing on small farm ponds, but my number one place to fish now is going to be a cove off of Lake Hartwell in Northwestern SC. Lake Hartwell is a large hydroelectric lake and my wife and I have a small "get-away" cottage near this cove. I have just bought a one-man inflatable pontoon boat that I can use to fish in this cove.

I was able to fish some on Tuesday and had pretty good success with very small bream, about 2 or 3 inches long, but only caught a couple of fish that were good hand-sized bream. I was using a fly rod, and my best 2 patterns were a foam "Predator" and a red and white "Humbug." At times I was fishing these two patterns as a tandem rig and had pretty good action with smaller fish. But I'm wondering where the larger fish were.

There is no grass, lily pads, etc on Hartwell, probably because of the large water level fluctuations necessary for the generation of electricity. But there were some sticks in the water where I was fishing and that's where I was catching the smaller fish. The water was probably about 3 or 4 feet deep.

I'm hoping someone can give me some suggestions about bream fishing on such a large lake and how to go about trying to catch some larger fish. Remember that I don't have a bass boat, so my fishing is pretty much restricted to this one cove. I tried several areas in the cove, but didn't find any larger fish anywhere I tried.

Hope you guys can help. Thanks in advance.

Take care

GF