Where and when to catch Australian Herring (Tommy Ruff) in South Australia: the SA season, the spots in our guide that hold them, and where to find SA's current size and bag limits.
Tommy ruff are South Australia's jetty fish. Pretty much every jetty, breakwall and beach in the state has them, they bite year-round, they come to berley like nothing else, and under the lights on a calm evening they'll keep a family busy for hours. They're the fish most South Australians caught first, the bait that catches the mulloway, and, with garfish and calamari closed in the gulfs, they're carrying a lot of jetty sessions on their own right now. Fish in the gulfs are mostly young ones; the big tommies are on the open coast.
Western Australian limits don't apply in South Australia.
Where to Catch Australian Herring (Tommy Ruff) in SA
Tommy ruff are listed at about 55 SA spots, which is most of the jetties. Metro jetties are best after dark under the lights, and the southern Fleurieu jetties, Yorke and Eyre peninsula jetties and the open surf hold the bigger fish.
Small pieces of prawn, pilchard, cockle, maggots (gents), squid strip, bread or dough
Lures
Bait jigs and sabiki flies, small metals, tiny soft plastics, small poppers on a still evening
Rigs
A pencil or bobby float with one or two size 8–12 long-shank hooks set 1–2 m deep, or a sabiki dropped beside the pylons. Keep the bait small, because herring have small mouths, and keep the gear light; a 2–4 kg outfit is plenty.
Technique
Berley is the whole game. A steady trickle of bread, pollard and a little tuna oil or mashed pilchard brings the school in and holds it, and then the bite is constant. Fish small baits under a float through the trail, or jig a sabiki slowly through the school. From the beach, cast small metals or bait jigs into fish dimpling the surface. Little and often with the berley beats one big dump.
Best Time
They feed through the day but are best in the morning and late afternoon, and jetty lights can produce steady fishing well into the night. A rising tide brings them closer to structure. They're about year-round in most places.
The traditional SA bait is gents (blowfly maggots) on a size 10–12 long-shank hook under a pencil float, fished through a bread-and-pollard berley trail.
PIRSA sets a tommy ruff bag limit. Check the PIRSA species profile before keeping a bucketful.
Identification
Also known asTommy ruff, tommies, ruff, herring
A small, streamlined silver fish with a greenish-blue to olive back, a forked tail, a big eye and rows of small golden spots along the side, clearest on younger fish. The two quick checks are the black tips on the tail lobes and the scales, which feel rough when you run a thumb from tail to head. The fish it gets confused with is juvenile Australian salmon, caught in the same water and near-identical at 25 cm. Salmon trout have smooth scales, no black tail tips, a smaller eye and a longer head, and they keep growing well past the size where herring stop. Despite the name, it's no relation of the northern-hemisphere herring.
Size & Growth
Most are 20–28 cm and 150–350 g. A good one is over 30 cm and pushes 400–500 g, and the species tops out around 41 cm and 800 g. They're short-lived and grow fast, which is why every fish in a school is about the same size. Young fish spend their first couple of years in sheltered southern bays before the adults head west to spawn, so the open coast generally holds the bigger fish.
Diet & Habitat
Opportunists that eat small crustaceans, worms, prawns, small baitfish and anything a berley trail puts in front of them. They school in the top few metres over sand and weed and around anything that holds bait, such as jetty pylons, breakwalls, groynes, reef edges and the surf zone, rarely deeper than about 10 m. Jetty lights draw them after dark.
Eating Quality
Better than their reputation, provided you bleed them on capture and get them on ice. The flesh is soft, white and a little oily, with a mild, faintly sweet flavour. They're small and bony, so most people scale, gut and cook them whole, crumbed and pan-fried, or butterfly the bigger ones. They hot-smoke well and are a terrific bait, live or cut, for mulloway, salmon and kingfish. Eat fresh; they soften fast and don't freeze well.