ON my next birthday I will turn 67, so my fishing sessions along the ocean rocks are nearly over. Since I was 16, I have targeted jewfish in the Pearl Beach, Kilcare, Box Head, Brisbane Water and Broken Bay area at the mouth of the Hawkesbury River. I have caught them from the rocks, the beaches and from boats using both baits and lures. I doubt whether there is anywhere in this area I haven’t fished for these jews.
My target has always been the larger fish, I have never fished for schoolies and because of the methods and baits I used and the places I fished, I have only ever fluked the odd small fish even though at times there have been plenty there to catch.
Nowadays, I visit all the recognised hot spots and fondly remember all the hundreds of fishermen who targeted these fish over so many years, but now there’s no one there. The fish have gone and the fishermen have gone. To say the mulloway population has crashed would be a massive understatement and I genuinely fear for the future of these magnificent fish.
The past few years have been wet and locals looked forward to catching some fish. The flooding of the Hawkesbury system that would normally bring catches of bigger fish has produced little. These big freshes, pouring all that water into the ocean has always seen large numbers of big fish congregate throughout Broken Bay. Many fish were washed out of the upper reaches of the river and others followed the dirty water inshore from the nearby reefs, beaches and headlands. It’s a natural phenomenon as sure as night follows day and when it doesn’t happen for a number of years it tells me there is a serious problem.
Now I’m not a panic merchant, I have seen many, many years when the big fish didn’t show. Some years they’re good, other years not so good. Their continued absence over such a prolonged period is evidence the fish are in real trouble. It is no longer a case of having a few bad years and sitting back and waiting for the big fish to come again. Maybe they will never come again…
Experience tells me that there will be benefits from these recent freshes, some juvenile fish will appear in the next few seasons but I’m sure the breeding stock of mature fish has fallen to critical levels.
I have always been of the belief that the majority of mulloway don’t permanently move far from their local river system and when these resident fish have gone there will be very few new fish coming from other areas. This theory is reinforced by tagging programmes conducted by State Fisheries in 1959 and 1993, showing that over 83 per cent of tagged fish were recaptured in the same areas where they were tagged. Even the Fisheries acknowledge this fishery is in serious trouble throughout the whole state. In one extensive report published in 2005 called Arresting the Decline of the Commercial and Recreational Fisheries for Mulloway they acknowledged that “the mulloway are growth overfished and possibly recruitment overfished. Changes in the management of the species, including greater protection to spawners and juvenile fish are required to arrest the decline in populations”.
Remember this report was published over seven years ago and the situation is a lot worse now and nothing has been done.
It should also be noted that this was a state-based report and not targeted exclusively to the Hawkesbury system that I am talking about here. Hawkesbury mulloway populations are in bigger trouble than any other area in NSW.
From my observations, mulloway numbers in the northern part of NSW seem nowhere near as depleted as the Hawkesbury system and even though the number of bigger fish has generally declined up north, there are still plenty of fish about. Many locals are also reporting healthy numbers of juvenile fish in these northern rivers due to big ongoing freshes in the past few years. This is not the case in the Hawkesbury. Even though there has been a small show of juvenile fish the past few seasons, the bigger fish are just not there. It is not only the Hawkesbury River and the Broken Bay inshore fishery that has declined, ask any outside fishermen in this area how the jewies are. They will all tell you it’s never been as bad as the past few years. In fact, in 2004-05 when the State Fisheries were doing catch surveys trying to assess the populations in this area, they were unable to secure sufficient numbers of local mature fish to study.
Larger fish of 25 to 30 kilos have always been commonplace in the Hawkesbury system but are now so rare as to be legendary. A big jewie now is about 15 kilos. The rare 20 to 25 kilo fish is a monster and makes the news. So what has happened?
Without question, the responsibility for the decline in fish numbers has to be borne entirely by State Fisheries, they are the sole government authority charged with protecting these fish. They make all the rules. They dictate who catches the fish, where they catch them, how many, how big and how often. The responsibility for the decline is theirs alone. However, to be fair, during the same period of this decline they have had their hands full with restructuring the whole commercial sector through licence buybacks, share management, river closures etc. Their efforts have resulted in laying the foundations for managing and protecting most fish resources into the future but the responsibility is still theirs.
There have also been other contributing factors beyond the control of State Fisheries, for example the previous drought that lasted for well over ten years resulting in limited spawning opportunities and recruitment of juvenile fish due to the absence of fresh water flooding into the Hawkesbury system.
Even so, without the floods, every year the big fish would appear, fully in roe, so regular spawnings did continue to take place but in reduced numbers. In the early days before the drought the Hawkesbury River had regular floods and huge volumes of water were often released from Warragamba Dam into the system. This would trigger multiple spawnings in the one season. With the increase in human population in the Sydney region and the growing demand for water these large discharges just never happened during the drought years. There were a few smaller releases but only to flush out the huge algae blooms that had choked the upper reaches of the river.
Warragamba has overflowed several times recently and flushed the river, but I think the population of mature spawning fish has fallen well below the numbers needed to recover in the near future.
There are only two reasons for the dramatic decline in fish numbers: overfishing and the lack of suitable habitat with an unpolluted, healthy environment.
Despite previous algae blooms and effluent discharges into the upper catchment, I believe water quality is not a factor in the decline of the mulloway populations in Broken Bay, Pittwater, Brisbane Waters and the mouth of the Hawkesbury River where the bulk of these fish have always been located. These systems are flushed with an exchange of good quality seawater twice every day.
I have never heard of a big fish kill due to suspect water quality in these areas in over 50 years of fishing here. This includes all those early years when sewage from pan toilets was taken straight from households and dumped into the sea at Mount Ettamalong on the northern end of Pearl Beach. I would sit on Pearl Beach with this stink in my nostrils, but the big fish were still there and no fish kills resulted.
Another factor working against the mulloway population is the geographical location of the Hawkesbury River system. This waterway is just too close to the most heavily populated city in Australia and the existing breeding stock has been severely exposed to overfishing, both recreational and commercial. Despite the previous drought and the overfishing, the fact is these circumstances should have been taken into account in formulating fisheries management policy. The decline hasn’t happened overnight. Even though State Fisheries have conducted many studies and published many reports over many years, the management of this resource has been completely ignored. It’s still happening today, more meetings, more committees, more talk. Talk will not save one jewfish – some action will.
The time has come for some drastic conservation measures to be put into place and something substantial needs to be done urgently to turn things around. They have known of the problem for many years and have done little. Their efforts have been to form mulloway planning groups and various other committees involving concerned “stakeholders”. Historically the formation of these stakeholder groups and committees has been a well used tactic to remove public pressure from the department. We have seen it so many times in the past. They seek input from stakeholders who have a genuine concern for the resource and then they just disregard their recommendations.
One worthwhile recommendation that did come up was to increase the minimum legal size to 75cm for both recreational and commercial fishermen. I can’t see how this is practical, how do you stop fish smaller than 75cm ending up in prawn trawls or gill nets, especially when 90 per cent of the existing commercial catch is under 75cms (Fisheries own figures)?
Fisheries have only been playing with the problem, for several years they have been experimenting with restocking mulloway fingerlings into various lake and river systems but the viability of introducing hatchery bred fish into large, wild saltwater environments is still unproven and to me seems a wasted effort. This is more obvious when they are seen to be introducing such small numbers, say 50,000 or even 100,000 fish at a time. If they were introduced in conjunction with other conservation measures then maybe it would be beneficial. To place such a small number of hatchery bred fingerlings in a huge, wild river environment like the Hawkesbury, Broken Bay system seems absolutely futile. When you consider just one wild mulloway of only 10 kilos can produce a million eggs at least once a year and maybe even twice in suitable conditions, it makes more sense to look after the existing breeding stock already in the system.
So what is the answer?
(Stay tuned for Brian’s conclusion in Part 2 this Thursday).
Author’s bio: Brian Hay has been a recreational fisherman his whole life and has been involved with many fishing clubs, held most club positions and represented Avoca, Central Coast and NSW in all forms of competition. He bases his article on first hand knowledge gained from catching jews in the Hawkesbury River region for more than 50 years.
