Where and when to catch Yelloweye Mullet 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.
Yelloweye mullet are the most common mullet in South Australian waters and the default catch for anyone with a float, a loaf of bread and an hour at a jetty. They school along the metro beaches and jetties, through the Port River and West Lakes, around the Fleurieu and into the Coorong, where they also support a commercial fishery. They're not glamorous, but they bite when nothing else will, they're a top bait for mulloway and sharks, and fresh ones are better eating than their reputation.
SA Size & Bag Limits
SA limits for Yelloweye Mullet are set by PIRSA and change from time to time, so we link them rather than copy them.
Check PIRSA's limits and PIRSA: Mullet fishing limits before you fish.
Western Australian limits don't apply in South Australia.
Where to Catch Yelloweye Mullet in SA
Almost anywhere sheltered water meets sand or weed: metro jetties and breakwaters, estuaries and river mouths, the Coorong, and the jetties of the gulfs and Kangaroo Island. Fifty-odd SA spots below list them.
Bread dough, bread, small pieces of peeled prawn, maggots, worms (blood, tube or beach worms) and small strips of squid. Dough is the cheapest and often the best.
Lures
Rarely a lure fish. They'll occasionally take a tiny soft plastic or a small fly worked slowly through a school, but bait under a float is far more reliable.
Rigs
A light rod of about 2–2.4 m, 4–6 lb line, a small pencil or quill float, a split shot or two and a long-shank size 10–12 hook. Keep the bait small; mullet have small mouths. On a beach, a light running sinker rig with a short dropper works in the gutters.
Technique
Berley is the whole game. Throw in a handful of soaked bread, pollard or mashed bread and tuna oil a little up-current, set the float so the bait drifts at the depth the school is holding, and strike at the first dip: mullet bites are quick and fussy. Keep the berley going in small amounts and the school stays put. Shallow, clear water at a jetty or estuary bank is easier to fish if you stand back and keep your shadow off the water.
Best Time
They feed through the day, and in many places best of all on a rising tide pushing over sand and weed flats. Calm conditions make the float bite easier to read. Cooler months bring the bigger schools into many estuaries and onto beaches, but there are fish around year-round.
PIRSA lists mullet together on one limits page, with limits that differ by fishing zone (Spencer Gulf, Gulf St Vincent and Kangaroo Island, and the rest of the state). Check the page for the zone you're fishing.
Identification
Also known asMullet, yellow-eye, Coorong mullet, Victor Harbor mullet
A slender, round-bodied mullet, greenish-brown to olive across the back with silvery sides and a pale belly. The giveaway is the eye: a bright yellow iris that no other common mullet has. It also lacks the dark spot at the base of the pectoral fin that several other mullets carry, and has a slightly pointed snout with a small mouth. Sea mullet are bigger, bluer-backed and have clear, fatty-lidded eyes; flat-tail mullet have a blunter head. Juvenile salmon and herring school in the same shallows but have forked tails and are much more silver all over.
Size & Growth
Most fish are 20–30 cm and a few hundred grams. A big one is 35–40 cm, and the species reaches about 44 cm and lives to about 10 years. They mature at around 24–25 cm, so a school of 20 cm fish is mostly juveniles. Surf and open-coast fish generally run bigger than the ones crowding a jetty or estuary bank.
Diet & Habitat
Schools of yelloweye mullet live in estuaries, coastal lagoons, bays and along surf beaches, mostly over sand, mud and seagrass, and push well up estuaries into brackish water. Small fish eat zooplankton; adults graze algae and pick small invertebrates, worms and detritus off the bottom and off jetty pylons and rock walls. They're a southern temperate fish, and they're found almost anywhere sheltered shallow water meets sand.
Eating Quality
Underrated. Fresh yelloweye mullet is good eating if you bleed and ice it straight away and eat it within a day or two: the flesh is soft and a bit oily, with a fuller flavour than whiting. Fillet and skin them, or scale and cook whole; they pan-fry, grill and smoke well. Frozen, they mostly become bait, and a strip or a whole fresh mullet is a top bait for mulloway, flathead and sharks.