How to Fish Sydney Harbour by Craig McGill



Sydney Harbour John Dory

 Sydney Harbour by Craig McGill

Sydney harbour kingies move in about October. For some reason their distribution at this time is limited to the Spit and lower Middle harbour region and generally up around Goat island. They are usually a bigger run of fish than the average summer fish and range from 70 --to 120 cm. There is no visual or electronic signs of them. The only way you will know they are there is to fish for them. They don’t come near the surface and they mostly hold under the marina and the moorings making them hard to find on the sounder.  The major stronghold of arrow squid is in this area and my bet is that this is why the kings are here too.

Round about November the rats come in. These are the fish that will swarm throughout the harbour all

summer and autumn. The first sign of them is on the surface. This time of year sees a lot of surface action

with bonito, tailor and salmon on the lower harbour. The kings get in on the act as well. They are hard to

catch at this time and your best bet is with a fly. They are feeding on ‘eyes’ (tiny baitfish) and it’s hard to interest them in anything else.



Big day on the Harbour for Kingies

 Once they go off the “eyes’ they move in around the marker buoys and yacht moorings. This happens just before xmas.  Now they are much less selective and this is the time to catch large numbers of them on Squid, Slug-go and flies. You can see the fish visually and on the sounder. They are smaller fish ranging from 50 to 70 cm.  It’s also worth mentioning that the bigger fish that were being caught in late October and November move back offshore for about 6 weeks between December and mid January.  This goes a long way to explaining why the fishing seems to go quiet during this period after what seems a very good start to the season.

By mid February they will be throughout the harbour ranging as far up as Cockatoo island in the harbour and Bantry bay in Middle harbour depending on how much rain we have had and where  the squid go. North harbour will be thick with them as well. They are generally going nuts by this stage and it’s a sorrowful day when you can’t catch at least a couple

By mid April you won’t get too many around the markers but they will still be going crazy in middle harbour.  Some bigger fish move in again around the deeper markers and the Spit.

Some of the deeper spots between Watsons and Rushcutters bays also fish well for big fish.

  By July they have all but gone back offshore in search of warmer water and you are lucky if you get any at all in the harbor. I have caught fish both big and small around the wedding cakes , Neilson park and north head in winter and early spring but there is no consistency or pattern to these appearances.

It seems to be taking us a long time to break out of the old, bad, traditional habit of using live yellowtail for kings (and jews for that matter).  Live yakkas for kings are now a historical bait. Techniques

for fishing are improving all the time. Tackle technology improves and we are finding better techniques and baits to catch fish all the time.  It’s called progress and now in the year 2009 the best bait for kingies is squid ----just as it always has been.

Kingies will accept a wide range of baits and techniques. They will pick up a stray bream bait, grab a trolled minnow lure, eat the occasional live bait and pick up a crab drifted down for Grouper. Increased numbers of Kings are making them easier to catch.

If you want to catch the occasional king the above mentioned methods and baits will do it. If you want to catch a lot of kingies all the time then there is only one bait and two types of lures.

If you go to the trouble to learn to catch squid you will always catch a lot of kings and that is the only way   I know of to do it. If you go to the trouble of going to the fish markets and buying very fresh squid you will catch a few kings, sometimes.

If you want to catch them on lures a lot you must use the six or nine inch Slug-go or saltwater flies.  Poppers are OK for a few kings occasionally

  Soft plastic stick baits, particularly    Slug-go’s and the Silstar 9” Slapsticks are an awesome lure on a whole range of species but particularly kingies. It’s a good thing that most people think that they are a bit of a joke----- good for the fish that is. They are not new, they have been used in Australia for over ten years now it’s just that they are unpopular and about the only thing that seems to really like them, apart from a handful of anglers , is the fish. The challenge is up for a better Kingie lure though. White is the best colour.

That   challenge doesn’t include flies   which are also very good for kings. Their major drawback is that they are much harder to deliver at the best of times but even more so if it is windy or rough. Good flies include blue or silver surf candy and Deceivers in white.

Big Kingies do like whole live squid but small ones don’t.  Big kingies will just as happily take a squid head. So by using a squid head you will get lots of big and small kingies. But if you use live squid you will get fewer fish but they will be bigger on average.  A whole squid gut is not only an exceptionally good bait but it is also the best burly that you can use for kings. It’s all about the guts. Use the guts and especially the ink to entice the fish you can burst the ink sac before you send the bait down or you can let the first king burst it for you. The gut is always the first bait to go which must mean it’s the best bait.  Strips of squid cut from the tube are good baits particularly after the guts and heads have got the school in a frenzy. Rub it all in Ink

Kingies mostly hold from mid water down so obviously this is a good place to present your bait

High tide  and the first two hours of the run out ,early morning and late afternoon is when you will find them really feeding . That’s also a good time to catch squid. You won’t have to worry too much about tides or time of day it you pay very close attention to what I said earlier about the bait the guts and the ink. Kings are easily turned on and then off again if you know what buttons to push. The worst thing you can do is to keep presenting something that has been rejected, in the same manner. A school of following kings can be turned into a school of taking kings by something as simple as changing the presentation angle, . This applies to both lures and bait. If they follow a lure or show interest in a bait for more than three times without taking it don’t present it again.

They are the exact opposite to barra in this sense. Barra can be teased into striking where kings can be teased out of striking. They are stubborn bastards and the more you shove it in their face the more they’ll reject it

 Change lure size, let it sink, change presentation angle or best of all go away , try another spot and come back in half an hour.

To turn them on, surprise them. Rock up to a spot noisily. Throw your anchor with a big splash and then get all your baits out there quickly. Let the baits sink to the required depth and then rip them back in. Just as an excited dumb dog does stupid things, so do kingies. As soon as the anchor hits the water they come straight over to see what is happening. The key is to not give them too much time to think about it . Trick them into an impulse attack. Action excites them but not for long, so work quickly

In addition to this you are better to have five or six baits in the water rather than just a few. Once again this is more likely to excite them. If you can’t handle six rods just take a few out of action once you have the fish on the bite.

One final but equally important tip is to fish with your reel in gear and with your normal fighting drag. Don’t feed kingies any line when they take your bait.  Once a take is felt lower the rod down and move with the fish. Once the rod reaches the water it’s time to strike.

A by-catch of kingie fishing in Sydney harbour is the occasional Samson fish, Amber jack and to a lesser degree, Rainbow runner.

Distinguishing between the four had always been quite easy for me mainly because they were always caught in their juvenile sizes. Once they get big they become harder to tell apart



Nice kingie in front of Sydney Harbour Bridge

 The hardest to pick apart are amberjack and kingies because even as juveniles they are similar in coloration and body shape. If you have a king and an amberjack side by side its quite obvious. Amberjack are rounder and fuller over the top of the head and have a slightly bigger  and more forward eye .They are generally darker in coloration  and have a distinct yellow band running the length of their body The tail is not yellow like a kingie’s but rather a chocolate brown colour.

Samson fish, as juveniles, are very distinct and couldn’t possibly be confused with kings or Amberjack. They are very ‘trevally’ shaped and the coloration is a blotchy mix of brown yellow and white. According to Grants guide to Fishes, they have red teeth although on the juveniles that is only just apparent.

Rainbow Runner do get confused with kings but in my opinion you would have to be very unobservant to do so. They are very elongated, have a bigger tail and a pointy snout. Their coloration is the most distinguishing feature being bright iridescent blue\purple stripes running the length of their body on a yellowish back ground

There has always been a bit of confusion regarding distinguishing between kings, amberjack and Samson fish mainly because juvenile Samson’s look very different to adult samsons and none of the text books I refereed to mentioned this. The books say that Samson and amberjack are very similar which is true when they are big. So when someone catches a small Samson and it looks nothing like an amberjack the ID problems start. Secondly juvenile Samson’s vary dramatically in coloration between life and death. When a Samson is dead it becomes a very uniform yellowish\amber, similar in colour to a dead amberjack

Of course you can’t go wrong with fin counts but that’s way too boring to go into here. If you are really interested in that, buy a good ID book.

Ambers, Samson and Rainbow are all too uncommon, in Sydney Harbour, to target specifically. If you really want to catch one, then the only advice I can give you is to fish for kingies and sooner or later one will show up. Just like kingies they are all suckers for fresh squid and respond to the same techniques.  The only other thing I can suggest is to fish when the water is at its warmest.