Sydney bite times & fishing forecast

Sydney fishing times, planned before you go

Bite Compass is a free fishing almanac, and this is its New South Wales edition. Instead of juggling a tide chart, a wind app and a moon calendar, you get the best fishing times for Sydney, the Central Coast, the Hunter and the Illawarra in one place — every spot scored hour by hour for the next seven days, so you can decide on the session before the Spit Bridge decides for you.

Today's Sydney bite times and feeding windows

The bite score leans heavily on solunar feeding windows — the major windows when the moon is overhead or underfoot, and the minor windows around moonrise and moonset, all computed for Sydney's longitude and clock. Fish feed hardest in those windows, harder still when one overlaps dawn, dusk or a tide change. Open any spot to see its windows for the day.

Harbour, rock and breakwall conditions at a glance

A good feeding window still needs fishable conditions. Every forecast factors in live tides, wind speed and direction, swell and water temperature, then weighs them against moon phase and light. The east coast adds two quirks the score already knows about: the southerly change that arrives mid-afternoon and ends the session for anyone standing on an exposed wall, and the long-period groundswell that turns a flat ocean platform into a washing machine on an otherwise calm day. Wear the lifejacket on the rocks — plenty of coastal councils here have stopped treating it as a suggestion, and the stretches where it is still optional are not the gentle ones.

Where the fish are biting in New South Wales

Sydney Harbour is wharf-and-flats country for bream, dusky flathead and sand whiting within walking distance of a ferry stop, with kingfish holding on the deeper moorings and headlands through the warm months, blackfish on the weed over winter, and a jewie for whoever is still there at 2am. Anything you catch west of the Harbour Bridge is a photo, not dinner — the health advice up that end of the harbour is to eat none of it, and it has not softened in years. Outside the heads it is a different game: pigs and drummer off the ocean platforms at North Head, Maroubra and La Perouse, salmon and tailor along the beaches, and yakkas under every set of wharf lights to feed to something larger. North and south the pattern repeats — Pittwater and the Hawkesbury, the Central Coast lakes and their entrances, Lake Macquarie and the Swansea channel, the Newcastle breakwalls, Port Stephens and the Myall, then the Illawarra walls from Port Kembla to Kiama. Before any of it, the state wants its Recreational Fishing Fee, which you can buy by the day or by the year and which costs less annually than one afternoon of harbourside parking.

How the bite forecast works

Each spot page scores the day out of 100 from solunar feeding windows, tide movement, wind and water temperature, then shows the hours worth fishing. Read how the score is built.