Where and when to catch Tarwhine 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.
Tarwhine are the bream that NSW anglers catch while trying to catch bream. They school through the harbours, bays and coastal lakes alongside yellowfin bream, take the same baits, and often turn up in the same bucket. In NSW the two share rules as well as water, which makes telling them apart worth the ten seconds it takes.
NSW Size & Bag Limits
NSW limits for Tarwhine are set by NSW DPIRD and change from time to time, so we link them rather than copy them.
Check NSW DPIRD's limits and NSW DPIRD: tarwhine before you fish.
Western Australian limits don't apply in New South Wales.
Where to Catch Tarwhine in NSW
Tarwhine like shallow weed, moorings and structure in clean, salty water. The spots below list them: Sydney Harbour and Manly's North Harbour, Botany Bay's western shore, the Georges River at Captain Cook Bridge, Collaroy on the Northern Beaches, and the weed flats of Lake Macquarie at Pelican.
Peeled prawn, nippers (yabbies), worms, mussel, bread and bread dough, and cunjevoi or green weed off the rocks
Lures
Mostly a bait fish. Very small soft plastics (1.5–2 inch grubs and prawn shapes) take the odd one where bream are being chased on lures, but bait is far more reliable.
Rigs
Light line (4–8 lb) and small hooks (size 4–8 baitholder or long-shank). A lightly weighted running ball sinker rig on the bottom near structure, or a float rig set so the bait hangs just above the weed. Their mouths are small, so keep the hook and bait small too.
Technique
Fish close to structure with a small, lightly weighted bait and a steady trail of bread or chopped prawn berley to bring the school in and keep it feeding. Tarwhine are nibblers that pick at a bait, so wait for the line to move off before lifting. Once you find the school you can usually take several before they move on.
Best Time
Through the day, with tide changes and a rising tide around structure the most productive times. They're caught all year, and are most plentiful in the warmer months.
In NSW, tarwhine and bream are bagged together, so a tarwhine counts towards the same daily bag as your bream. Check NSW DPIRD for the current numbers.
Identification
Also known asSilver bream
A deep, silver bream-shaped fish with fine gold-yellow lines running along the flanks, a yellowish belly and fins, and a dark margin on the tail. The head is rounder and the snout blunter and shorter than a bream's. Yellowfin and black bream, the usual mix-ups, have no gold lines; the textbook check is the scales above the lateral line (six or seven rows on a tarwhine, four on a bream), and the quick one is inside: tarwhine have a black stomach lining, bream a pale one. Juvenile snapper carry blue spots and a pink cast.
Size & Growth
Most tarwhine caught are 20–30 cm and a few hundred grams. A 35–40 cm fish around a kilo is a very good one, and about 3 kg is the ceiling in Australian waters, though they grow bigger overseas. Schools tend to be one size, so the first few fish tell you whether the spot is worth staying at.
Diet & Habitat
Tarwhine have flat, molar-like teeth for crushing, and they use them on mussels, small crabs, worms, shrimp and weed and algae picked off structure and seagrass. They school in bays, harbours, estuary mouths and coastal lakes, around rock walls, jetty and wharf pylons, moored boats, weed beds and reef edges, usually in shallow water and close to something solid.
Eating Quality
Good eating, very like bream: white, mild, slightly sweet and firm. Scale, gut and cook smaller fish whole, and fillet anything over about 30 cm. Pan-fry, bake whole with lemon or cook on a barbecue plate; the skin crisps well if you scale it properly. Fish from weedy upper estuaries can taste a little weedy, so open-water fish are the pick. Bleed and ice them as soon as they're caught.