The Best Bait for Tailor from the Beach in WA
If you’ve stood on a Perth beach at last light watching birds work a bait school fifty metres out, you already know tailor are one of the most satisfying fish in the state to catch off the sand. They hit hard, they run, and they’ll keep biting long after dark. The trick most blokes new to beach tailor get wrong is bait choice. Get it right and you’ll hook up inside ten minutes. Get it wrong and you’ll stand there watching the person twenty metres down the beach bend their rod over repeatedly while you curse the wind.
Whole Mulies on a Gang of 3/0s: The Classic
If there is one rig that defines Perth beach tailor fishing, this is it. A whole pilchard (mulie) threaded onto three ganged 3/0 hooks, fished on a running-sinker rig with a metre or so of 30-40lb leader. That’s the rig. It has caught more tailor off WA beaches than every soft plastic ever made combined, and it’s still the first thing any sensible person reaches for.
Why it works is simple. A whole mulie is roughly the size of a tailor’s preferred meal, it leaks oil and flesh into the wash, and the ganged hooks match the length of the bait so a fish hitting anywhere along the body gets pinned. Don’t skimp on hook quality — tailor have a full set of teeth and they’ll find any weakness in cheap wire.
Bait Care: Smell Is Everything
Mulies fish best when they’re still cold and firm. Pull them straight out of the freezer, keep them in a small esky or zip-lock, and only thaw what you’re about to cast. A mulie that’s been sitting in the sun turning into paste for two hours will fall off the hooks on the first cast and smell of nothing much — tailor hunt on scent and flash, and a mushy bait gives you neither.
Keep them cold, keep them firm, and re-bait often. A fresh mulie every twenty minutes will out-fish a tired one every time. Not glamorous advice but it’s the difference between fish in the esky and stories at the pub.
Alternatives When Mulies Aren’t About
Sometimes the servo is out, sometimes you want to mix it up, sometimes the mulies at the tackle shop look like they were caught during the Howard government. Blue bait (blueys) are the obvious swap — smaller, a bit tougher on the hook, and deadly on school tailor. Rig them on a gang of 2/0s or a single 3/0 through the nose.
Whole garfish is another ripper, especially for bigger fish. A gardie has a slim profile that swims well in the wash and tailor absolutely monster them. Fresh strips of tailor itself (once you’ve caught one) or whiting fillet work brilliantly too — oily, tough, and they stay on the hooks through a decent shore dump. If you can wrangle a live herring out of a nearby jetty, pin it through the shoulders and send it out under a float or on a running sinker. A live herring is basically a tailor-ordering service.
Lures vs Bait: Know When to Switch
Bait isn’t the only answer. Metal slugs, stickbaits and big soft plastics all catch tailor off the beach, and when the water’s clean and the fish are actively busting up bait on the surface, a 30g chrome lure cast into the action will out-fish a bait ten times over. Lures are also the call if you’re travelling light — no esky, no bait board, just a rod and a small tackle tray.
Bait comes into its own after dark, in dirty water, or when you want to sit in one spot and let the fish come to you. A cast-and-wait mulie session on a rising tide at dusk is one of the most reliable ways to catch tailor in WA, and the gear can stay in the sand holder while you have a coffee. Horses for courses — carry both if you can.
Rig, Sinker and Leader
A running sinker rig is the standard: ball sinker running on the mainline down to a swivel, then 60-100cm of 30-40lb fluorocarbon or hard mono leader to your gangs. Use the lightest sinker that’ll hold bottom — in a calm gutter that might be a size 2 ball, in a solid shore break you might need a size 5 or a small star sinker. Overweighting is a classic rookie move that kills bite detection and drags your bait out of the strike zone.
Fixed-sinker rigs (paternoster style) have their place, especially when you want the bait suspended off the bottom in weedy water, but running sinker is the workhorse. Tailor are fussier about feeling resistance than people give them credit for — a free-running sinker lets them grab and go before they spit it.
Timing, Tide and Where to Stand
Dawn and dusk. Always. The hour either side of sunrise and the hour either side of sunset are when tailor push in closest to the sand and hunt hardest. A rising tide into low light is the gold-standard window. Middle of the day under a blue sky is generally a waste of bait unless the water’s churned up by swell.
For Perth, the usual suspects all produce. Trigg Beach and Scarborough Beach have the gutters and reef edges that tailor love. Mullaloo Beach is a quieter option up north with consistent autumn runs. Swanbourne Beach fishes well on bigger swells when the shore break stirs things up — just be prepared for a bit more skin on display than you bargained for. City Beach Groyne gives you structure to fish alongside, and North Mole remains the Perth tailor mark everyone knows about, for good reason.
Once the sea breeze slams in at 2pm with all the subtlety of a real estate agent at an open home, you may as well pack the rods up and come back at six. Check wind, swell and tide on BiteCompass before you commit — a howling onshore at Trigg might be glassy calm at Mullaloo, and guessing from the driveway has cost more petrol than anyone wants to admit.
If you plan to keep fish, check the current bag, size and possession limits with DPIRD before you head out — the rules shift and it’s your job to know.
The short version: whole mulies on gang hooks, kept cold, fished on a running sinker at dawn or dusk. That’s 80% of successful WA beach tailor fishing right there. Everything else — blueys, gardies, lures, live herring — is refinement. For the full rundown on the species see the tailor page, and for wind, swell and solunar timing for any of the beaches above, BiteCompass has you sorted before you load the car.