Lake Seminole Mayfly Bream With Jack Wingate

“Come here to your sweet daddy!” Jack Wingate cackled as he swung the bream into the boat. “You are going into the Crisco!” he announced to the fish, as he unhooked the popping bug from its mouth.

The mayflies are hatching on Lake Seminole and some of the most fun fishing of the summer has just begun.

In late April, 1999, we at GON had alerted Jack Wingate, who runs Wingate’s Lunker Lodge on Lake Seminole, that we were interested in doing an article on fishing for bream during the mayfly hatch. Jack assured us that he would call when the first hatch occurred.

He called on Monday morning, May 10. “The first big hatch of the season happened on Saturday,” he said. “You need to grab your fly rod and come on down.”

By mid-morning GON-TV videographer Danny Williams and I were on the road heading south toward Lake Seminole.

Mayfly hatches are cyclic. The larvae emerge from the muddy bottom of Lake Seminole (and along other lakes and rivers) in 12- to 15-day cycles. The larvae hatch into mayflies and they swarm into the trees surrounding the lake. They fly best just before dark, and during a big hatch, the numbers can be astonishing. The flies aren’t particularly accomplished at the finer points of flying and many bugs end up fluttering to the surface of the lake. Too, they are short-lived insects, living only a few days to mate and lay eggs before they die.

When the flies flutter to the surface of the lake, it’s like ringing a dinner bell for Lake Seminole’s bream and other fish that move into the shallows under overhanging bushes to feast.

By mid-afternoon that Monday, we were in Jack’s 1973 Ranger bass boat on the Flint River arm of the lake just downriver of his Lodge.

Jack cast his popping bug into the shallows and instantly several small bream rose from the green water to inspect the offering.

”Would you just look at that!” said Jack. “That bug is just like Custer — he’s surrounded!”

“Here’s what we came for,” said Jack Wingate, showing the 3/4-lb. shellcracker in his left hand. “But this is what we caught…” he said of the small bluegill in his right hand. We caught dozens of bream, but none with “shoulders.” 

Jack is an accomplished flyfishermen with lots of experience flinging popping bugs for bream. At the end of his fly line and 5-foot long, 4-lb. leader was a chartreuse popping bug: formally, a Marathon Original Wigglepopper in the No. 10 size.

Stripping line, and with a backward sweep of his forearm and wrist, Jack picked his popper from the surface of the water. Fly line snaked through the air and over his shoulder as his forearm flicked back forward and the fly line hissed through his rod’s guides.

First, the fly line rolled out on the water, and finally the bug dropped gently onto the surface.

Immediately a small, orange-bellied bream slapped at the bug and Jack set the hook. Jack’s leader darted left, then right as the bream flashed below the surface. “They don’t have to be big to be fun,” he said, as he played the fish to the boat.

Jack has been fishing Seminole for 47 years, ever since there was a Seminole, but he hasn’t fished the lake so long that he’s forgotten the fun in catching bream. “I love to see ’em hit on top,” he said, with a wide grin.

Finding a concentration of mayflies is the key to finding a concentration of fish, and birds often point the way.

“See that blackbird over there?” said Jack, pointing with his fly rod to a massive tree-trunk on the bank where a blackbird moved quickly through the foliage.

“He’s feeding on the mayflies,” he said. “Green herons, blue herons, crows — just about every bird around will eat mayflies and the birds will show you where the mayflies are.”

Jack also recommends a Schuman’s cricket as a bream-catcher when the mayflies are hatching. He fishes either a gray or black cricket.

I started fishing a mayfly imitation, but quickly switched to a Marathon popper after Jack jumped to a 6-0 lead. On my first two casts with the popper I caught two bream. The afternoon we fished, the bream clearly preferred the chartreuse popper. Many of the fish, however, were slapping at the bug without eating it.

The popping bug comes with long rubber legs, and to reduce the number of short strikes, Jack usually amputates the last half-inch or so of the rubber legs. The bream, he said, will sometimes hit short, aiming at the long legs dangling on the surface.

Bream aren’t the only fish with a taste for mayflies.

“I guess the doggone things must taste good,” Jack speculated. “Nearly every fish in the lake will eat them — bass, catfish, hybrids. Now when a hybrid hits, it’s a lot like flinging your line into the side of an Amtrak train — he is going to get some of your line!”

The most comfortable way to fish for bream is by wading, said Jack. We tried it out at the east end of Alligator Island. We tied his boat off to an old stump and stepped into the thigh-deep water. Felt good.

“Jack,” I said. “Aren’t there a lot of alligators in Seminole?”

“Big ones,” he replied. Jack said the alligators aren’t likely to bother a wading adult and that he has never had any trouble with them in 47-some-odd years. I kept my eyes peeled just the same.

Jack made another long, smooth cast and when the popping bug had settled on the surface, he twitched the line to make the popping bug’s rubber legs move. “You want to just wiggle those legs and the bream can’t stand it,” he said.

In the late afternoon, with the sun still high in the sky, few mayflies were apparent. The bugs fly best near dusk, said Jack, and they are attracted to lights.

“Some of those lighted highway bridges in Bainbridge will have dead bugs on them two inches deep,” he said. “They are in the trees right now, but when the sun gets down just over the horizon we are gonna see some mayflies.”

To demonstrate his point, he pulled the front end of the boat up near the bank, under a low-hanging limb laced with Spanish moss.

“Shake the limb,” said Jack.

I shook it and a dozen or so mayflies fluttered out.

Seminole isn’t the only Georgia lake where you can find mayflies. The bugs seem to prefer soft, muddy banks which makes both Seminole and Blackshear ideal lakes. But you can also find mayflies hatching on Oconee, Sinclair and Lake Weiss. Mayflies are less common on hard-bottomed lakes where the water-level fluctuates widely. The flies have a yearlong life-cycle and low water level during the winter isn’t favorable for them.

For most Seminole fishermen, a popping bug is likely the most popular way to fish for bream when the mayflies are out, but it’s not always at the end of a flyrod.

“Some of the local fishermen will take a cane pole and tie on a popping bug with no cork and no weight and do real well,” said Jack.

Jack and I caught about 30 bream, nearly all of them on the Marathon popping bug. Jack was surprised by the size of our fish — we never did catch any bream with “shoulders.” Nearly all the bream we caught were small, despite Seminole’s reputation for big bull bream.

It has already been an outstanding spring for shellcrackers at Seminole. There are plenty of snails for the fish to eat this year and the fish have grown to bragging-size proportions. On the Sunday before we fished, two bulging-fat shellcrackers that weighed two pounds were brought in at Wingate’s Lodge.

Just before the sunset, we motored to the bank of Jack’s campground, just east of the entrance to the boat trail to the Lunker Lodge, and there we found dozens of mayflies hovering over one particular bush.

“They are just getting started,” said Jack. “You just wait.”

Forty-five minutes later, when the sun had set, we motored up to the mouth of the entrance to Jack’s boat trail. In a place where almost no mayflies had been apparent an hour earlier the mayflies had come out, as Jack had promised — by the ten-thousands.

Jack wades into the shallows around Alligator Island with his fly rod. When the mayflies are hatching, bream often hang out under low-hanging trees, like the ones in the background, waiting for the flies to fall into the water.

As far as we could see along the bank, from the water level to the tops of the trees, thick clouds of mayflies hovered and flew near the tree limbs.

“Isn’t that something?” said Jack, watching the clouds of mayflies. “Sometimes they will be like that all over the lake.”

On the calm water beneath the tree, however, we noticed only a few small dimples from fish feeding on the surface — likely on bugs that had crashed to the surface.

“The mayflies are late this year,” said Jack. “This is the first hatch and the bream aren’t on them strong, yet.”

But for the rest of the summer, somewhere on the lake you can almost always depend on mayflies hatching somewhere.

When the bream figure out that there are mayflies hatching they will congregate under overhanging branches and wait for a winged dinner to fall to the surface. Often on warm summer evenings when both the bugs and bream are the thickest, you can hear the slurping and popping as bream hit mayflies on the surface under particularly productive trees.

When the bream are on a mayfly-feeding-frenzy you can catch a bream on nearly every cast, said Jack.

There are three reasons why bream are fun to catch on a fly rod and a popping bug: there are lots of them; they are usually eager to bite, and for their size they fight well.

“They get angry,” said Jack. “If bream weighed five pounds you’d never get them to the boat.”

There’s a fourth reason to fish for bream: “Fried up crisp, they will make you smack your lips,” said Jack.

For the latest report on whether and where the mayflies are hatching, call Jack at Wingate’s Lunker Lodge at (912) 246-0658. And if you’d like a guided trip on Lake Seminole for bream, Jack can arrange a firsthand look for you, too.

This article originally appeared in the June 1999 issue of GON magazine. A television segment on this trip was also part of Episode 4 of GON-TV that aired nationwide on The Outdoor Channel and across Georgia on dozens of local stations.