Also known as Blackie, Black. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Black Marlin — World's premier billfish — Cairns to Cape Bowling Green. Also called Blackie, Black.
Black marlin spawn off Cairns from September to December and the juvenile recruits stay in the GBR lagoon for the first 18 months before pushing offshore. The Cairns heavy-tackle season exists because of one geographic accident — the GBR shelf is the only place on the planet where 500 kg+ marlin reliably come within 30 nm of shore.
Black Marlin is also known as: Blackie, Black. World's premier billfish — Cairns to Cape Bowling Green.
Regional names can confuse anglers and cause misidentification. The table of common names below covers the most-used alternatives across Australia, New Zealand and the US:
Key to correct identification: check the regulations-authority species sheet for your state or territory before keeping any fish — minimum legal sizes, bag limits and identification guides are published by each fisheries department and are the authoritative source.
Hero spots in our coverage where Black Marlin is in season for June. Click through for the live forecast.
Out of season across our covered spots in June. Check back in October.
Cairns heavy-tackle season (Sept–Dec): live bait a skippy or yellowfin (slow-troll a slow-paced 2.5–3 knots) along the outer reef shelf. Strikes from granders (450 kg+) are once-in-a-lifetime events. NSW/QLD-SE light tackle: troll skirted lures or rigged ballyhoo at 6–8 knots for school marlin in summer / autumn. Tag-and-release is standard; the IGFA tag database has decades of recapture data on marlin.
Tide is irrelevant; current and water temp are everything. Marlin work along the EAC and similar continental shelf currents — find the bait, find the marlin. Convergence zones / colour changes are textbook fish-holding structure.
Cairns blackies are weakly moon-dependent but pre-spawning aggregation behaviour around the Sept–Dec full and new moons can concentrate fish at known shelf-line locations. Light-tackle juvenile marlin off northern NSW are most active in the few days after a full moon (anecdotal but well-known).
Tag-and-release is the international norm and the only ethical practice. AU AFMA rules technically allow take of black marlin under HMS but no serious angler boats one. Use circle hooks where required, vent fish, and revive properly before release. Verify AFMA HMS rules; some zones have full no-take protections.
From our training corpus of ~1.1M angler-logged catches across 14 regions. Last refreshed 2026-05-18.
Olli-Mikael Vaittinen has fished his whole life. Fifteen years of fly fishing, guiding seasons on Norway's Lakselva — his favourite Atlantic salmon river — and a blue marlin landed in Vava'u, Tonga. Founder of Fishare — the app that puts the data behind the decisions every angler makes on the water.
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