Where and when to catch Garfish in New South Wales: the NSW season, the spots in our guide that hold them, and where to find NSW's current size and bag limits.
The garfish on the NSW coast is the eastern sea garfish, a close cousin of the southern sea garfish of South Australia and the west, found from Moreton Bay down to Eden. They school over weed and seagrass in sheltered bays and harbours by day and come up to the surface at night, and a float, a pinch of bread and a berley trail off a harbour wharf is one of the gentlest ways to spend a morning on the coast.
Western Australian limits don't apply in New South Wales.
Where to Catch Garfish in NSW
Gar like clear, sheltered water over weed. The spots below list them: Clifton Gardens wharf in Sydney Harbour, Lilli Pilli Point and Baths on Port Hacking, and Shoal Bay Wharf in Port Stephens.
Bread or bread dough, maggots (gents), small pieces of prawn, pipi or squid, and dough mixed with tuna or pilchard oil
Lures
Effectively a bait-only fish. Tiny flies and very small soft plastics take the odd one, but a float and bait is far more reliable.
Rigs
A light float rig: a small pencil or quill float, a split shot or two, and a size 10–12 long-shank hook 30–60 cm below the float on 2–4 lb line. Some anglers run two hooks at different depths. No sinker on the bottom: the bait should hang just under the surface.
Technique
Berley first. A steady trickle of bread, pollard and a little fish oil draws the school up, then drift the float rig back through the trail with a small bait. Set the float shallow, since gar feed at or just below the surface. Watch the float for a dip or a slide sideways and lift gently into the fish; a hard strike pulls the hook out of that thin beak. Keep the berley going and the school usually stays.
Best Time
Calm mornings and evenings are best, because wind and chop make float fishing hard and push the schools off the shallows. They bite through the day in calm weather, and the warmer months bring the biggest schools onto jetties and seagrass flats. At night, schools move up near the surface and under jetty lights.
Identification
Also known asGar, eastern sea garfish, beakie
Long, slim and silver, pale greenish-blue over the back, with a blue-edged silver band along the flank and three narrow brown lines above it, a white belly and a long, bill-like lower jaw under a short upper jaw. The beak tip is red on a live fish and fades soon after landing. If both jaws are drawn out into a toothy beak, it's a longtom, not a gar. River garfish are smaller and live up in the estuaries. Eastern sea garfish meet the southern sea garfish around Eden, and the two are reported to hybridise there.
Size & Growth
Most garfish caught are 25–35 cm and 100–200 g, and a 40 cm gar is a good one. Schools are usually a single size class, so a jetty that's giving up pencil-thin gar today will probably keep doing so. Size makes little difference to the eating, though bigger fish are easier to prepare.
Diet & Habitat
Grazers more than hunters: they eat seagrass and algae by day and drifting plankton and small crustaceans at night, plus insects off the surface. Schools sit over seagrass beds in sheltered bays and estuaries and along jetties and breakwalls, usually in less than about 5 m and within a few metres of the surface, and they rise readily to a bread or pollard berley trail. Calm, clear water matters more to them than tide.
Eating Quality
Delicate, sweet white flesh with almost no oil and large scales that come off easily. Butterfly them by cutting down the back and pressing flat so the backbone lifts out in one piece, then crumb and shallow-fry, or pan-fry whole in butter. A minute or two a side is plenty: they overcook in seconds. They don't freeze well for the table, going soft and watery, but freeze perfectly well as bait.