There is something magical about the combination of the full moon in late spring and bream fishing. After years of research, I've concluded that the magic has something to do with catching scads of bull bream in rapid succession on light tackle: the willingness of the fish to continue to bite until you are exhausted from catching them. If that doesn't interest you, read no further. The truth is, there's plenty of "magic" before and after the full moon and some of us are suckers for fishing bream beds.

Bream fishing in South Carolina actually begins to heat up during April in some lakes in the Palmetto State, and stays very good throughout the summer. May, however, is my kickoff time for these feisty flatfish. And the full moon in May seems to produce some of the best bream bed fishing of the year in most lakes in the state.

But not all good bream fishing will focus on the bedding action. A good example of this was a trip last spring with a good fishing buddy, Chuck Porter. Chuck caught limits nearly every time he fished in the upper portion of Lake Marion, especially during the bedding season. However, by the time I was able to get with him, the hard-core bedding action had passed. We tried several of his honeyholes that had produced limits only days earlier, but only scattered fish were available.

Therefore, we resorted to the time-tested method of "hunt-and-peck" bream fishing. It works great on Lake Marion, or any bream lake for that matter. We simply took our bream busters and light tackle spinning rigs and started working the seemingly endless stretch of great-looking water. We worked around cypress trees, logs, stumps, brush pads and weeds. As things worked out, we caught a few fish around all those diverse types of cover. The only thing that was really consistent was that the fish were still shallow. They had simply scattered to random cover along the shoreline.

So we hunted them down and pecked away at our limit by taking a couple of fish here, three or four there. Occasionally, we stopped far enough from some good-looking, very shallow spots and cast to them before the boat could spook the fish. That tactic worked out rather well, too.

Lake Marion, during prime bream fishing time, certainly has to rank as one of the premier bream lakes in the state. The average size of the fish is sensational and you do not need sophisticated equipment. In addition, shoreline fishing is excellent, and for that reason at just about every bridge crossing back in the creeks or main body of the lake, people line the shoreline with cane poles and spinning tackle. They also have big buckets to keep all their fish in as well.

But there are other outstanding places for bream fishing, too. In the upstate, Lake Jocassee, with its ultra-clear water, offers great bream fishing this time of the year. Lake Bowen near Spartanburg is excellent, as is Lake Russell on the Savannah River. Lake Edgar Brown is a 100-acre hotspot that's great for boat- and bank-fishing, too. Another hotspot is the Santee River from the Wilson Dam that impounds Lake Marion downstream past Jamestown.

Wrapping up the action would have to be Lake Murray. With the water in Lake Murray back to full pool after the extended drawdown, fisheries biologists think that one of the most positively affected fisheries will be the panfishing species for the next few years.