Garfish and Mullet: Catching WA’s Light-Tackle and Bait Species

Garfish — “gardies” — are the slender, surface-skimming fish with the spear-like lower jaw, schooling through estuaries and sheltered bays from spring into autumn. They’re light-tackle fishing in its purest form: tiny hooks, light line, and a float you watch like a hawk. Premium live bait, and one of Perth’s best eating fish for its size.

Mullet — mostly sea mullet and the smaller yelloweye mullet around Perth — are the workhorse. They graze the shallows and estuary margins in big schools, hoovering up algae and detritus, and they’re the bait of choice for everything from flathead to mulloway. They’re also a genuinely good feed, which most people don’t bother finding out.

Garfish fishing is a fussy, rewarding little craft. The rig is unchanged in fifty years and doesn’t need changing: a small clear bubble float (half-filled with water for casting weight), a metre of light leader, then a single tiny long-shank fine-wire hook tied off the end. No sinker. Size 10–12 hooks, 2–4lb mono. Anything heavier and gardies mouth the bait and spit it before you feel a thing.

Bait wants to be tiny and soft — bread dough, prawn slivers cut fingernail-sized, maggots, or thin squid strips. If it won’t fit a thumb-sized mouth without folding, it’s too big.

The whole game is berley. No berley, no gardies. Mix bread or pollard with breadcrumbs and a generous slop of tuna oil, work it into a steady cloud — a mesh berley pot off the jetty rail, or hand-thrown balls a rod-length up-current every ten minutes. The trail draws the school up to the surface, right where your float is drifting. The bite is a quiet dip, not a slam; lift gently into it.

Mandurah Jetty and the Coodanup foreshore on the Peel-Harvey are about as good as it gets, and Point Walter on the Swan holds them on calm mornings. Fish dawn or dusk, with a bit of tidal push and wind under 10 knots so the float doesn’t skate.

Mullet are easier to find than to hook, because they’re plankton-and-algae grazers that don’t strike a bait the way a predator does. Two approaches.

On a hook, fish a small long-shank (size 8–10) on light line under a float or a tiny running sinker, baited with bread dough, a soft peeled-prawn bit, or even a fingernail of fresh weed off the rocks. Berley heavily with mashed bread and pollard — the same stink-cloud that pulls gardies pulls mullet — and fish the trail in the shallow margins, jetty pylons and rock walls where they graze. Bites are soft and finicky; downsize until they commit.

In a cast net is how serious bait-gatherers fill a bucket fast. In WA you can only use a throw (cast) net up to a three-metre radius, and you must hold a recreational net fishing licence to do it. Netting is permitted only in tidal ocean and estuarine waters — never fresh water — and most estuarine waters are closed to net fishing to protect juvenile stocks. Don’t assume your local river mouth is open. Lift and clean the net at least once an hour, and protected or undersized fish can’t be kept, even as bait. Confirm the open areas and current rules with DPIRD before you throw a net anywhere.

Either way, the spots overlap with the gardie grounds — the Peel-Harvey system, the lower Swan, and ocean jetties like Rockingham Jetty.

This is where the morning’s work pays off. A live or fresh-dead garfish is a tailor, mulloway and mackerel magnet — hook a tailor bait through the back on a single hook or a gang, cast it into the wash at dusk, and hang on. Mullet are the same story with more meat: fish them live, as fillet strips, or rigged whole for mulloway, flathead and big tailor.

Both are also bait for bait — a strip of either will draw southern calamari onto a jig at the jetty lights, which then becomes bait for something bigger again. It’s bait all the way down, and that’s half the fun.

Don’t write either off as a feed. Garfish are one of Perth’s best eating fish for their size — sweet, delicate flesh, scales that strip off easily, pan-fried whole or butterflied. Sea and yelloweye mullet are darker and oilier, which makes people nervous, but bled and iced on the spot they’re excellent smoked, fried fresh, or off the barbecue. The trick with mullet is clean water and quick handling; the muddy reputation comes from fish left in a warm bucket.

Both garfish and mullet carry a bag limit of 30 in WA, and there’s no minimum size for either. The cast-net rules above are the part most people get wrong, so take them seriously. Limits and net rules do shift, so always confirm the current bag, size and netting rules with DPIRD before you head out.