Where and when to catch Bonito 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.
Bonito are the speed-spinning fish of the NSW coast. Schools push in along the headlands, breakwalls and harbour entrances as the warm current comes down the coast, and the inshore run around Sydney and the South Coast is strongest from late summer into autumn. They're small enough to catch on a mid-sized spin rod, fast enough to make it feel like a mistake, and they're the bait that half the kingfish anglers on the coast are really after.
Western Australian limits don't apply in New South Wales.
Where to Catch Bonito in NSW
Bonito turn up wherever clean blue water meets a headland or wall with bait around it: the ocean rock platforms of Sydney's eastern suburbs and the Royal National Park, the breakwalls at Newcastle and Port Kembla, the Central Coast headlands and the Illawarra points, and inside Sydney Harbour and Pittwater when bait pushes in. The spots below list them; check each spot's page for access and swell before heading to a rock platform.
A whole or half pilchard, whitebait or a live yakka floated out unweighted or under a bubble float. A strip of fresh bonito or slimy mackerel works once you have one. Bait is the backup plan; most bonito fall to lures.
Lures
Metal slugs and slices of 10–40 g, small chrome spoons, fast-sinking stickbaits, and small minnows or bibless lures for trolling. Match the size of the bait they're feeding on: when they're on tiny whitebait, a 10–15 g slug beats a big lure every time.
Rigs
A 2–4 m spin rod with a 2500–4000 reel, 10–20 lb braid and a 15–25 lb fluorocarbon leader tied direct to the lure with a loop knot. Go lighter on the leader in clear water. For bait, a single 2/0–4/0 hook on a long leader, unweighted or with a small ball sinker or bubble float.
Technique
Cast as far as you can toward working birds, surface bust-ups or the edge of the white water, let the lure sink a few seconds and wind fast. Bonito want speed: a retrieve that would bore a tailor is about right. If nothing hits on top, count the lure down deeper on each cast. Once a school shows, cast quickly; they rarely stay long. From a boat, troll small minnows or slugs at 5–7 knots past headlands and current lines.
Best Time
First light is the classic session, especially on a still morning when surface feeding is easy to spot. Bait showing on the surface matters more than the clock or the tide: a school pushing whitebait at 11 am beats any dawn with nothing showing. Clean, warm, blue water pushing in close usually brings them with it.
From the rocks, a 9–10 ft spin rod gets the extra casting distance that reaches a school working just out of range. On a breakwall, an 8–9 ft rod is plenty.
Where bonito and kingfish feed together, kingfish often sit underneath the bonito. A live bonito slow-trolled or floated off a headland is a top kingfish bait; check the NSW rules on using live bait before you do it.
Identification
Also known asBonnies, Australian bonito
A bullet-shaped little tuna: dark blue to green-blue across the back, silvery below, with several dark horizontal stripes running along the upper and middle flanks. Two dorsal fins, a row of small finlets behind the second dorsal and the anal fin, and a keeled tail wrist like every tuna. Open the mouth and you'll see a single row of distinct conical teeth, noticeably bigger than a small tuna's. The look-alikes are the other small tunas and mackerels: striped tuna (skipjack) carry their stripes on the belly, not the back; leaping bonito have large dark spots on the lower flanks and a tall black first dorsal; mackerel tuna have wavy bars on the back and a few dark spots under the pectoral fin.
Size & Growth
Most fish caught from the shore run 40–60 cm and 1–3 kg, and a typical fish is around 45 cm and 2 kg. The species reaches at least 1 m and about 9.5 kg, but a 4 kg bonito from the rocks is a very good one. They school by size, so the first fish of a session tells you what the rest will be. Growth is fast and the life is short by fish standards, which is one reason the schools come and go from year to year.
Diet & Habitat
An inshore pelagic: it lives in the upper water along the coast rather than on the bottom, and hunts small schooling fish such as pilchards, anchovies, whitebait and juvenile yellowtail, plus squid and small crustaceans. Schools push bait against headlands, breakwall ends, reef points and the mouths of large bays and harbours, and can follow bait well inside sheltered water. Expect them where clean, blue water meets structure, and expect them to move: a school can be in front of you for ten minutes and gone for the day.
Eating Quality
Polarising, and it depends almost entirely on handling. Bleed it the second it's landed (cut behind the pectoral fin or through the gill rakers) and get it into an ice slurry; an unbled bonito left in the sun turns soft and strong. Treated well, the dark red flesh is excellent raw as sashimi or poke, seared rare, or smoked. Cut out the dark bloodline and eat it within a day or two. Many anglers keep only what they'll use as bait, and fresh bonito strips are one of the best baits going for kingfish, mulloway and snapper.