Also known as Yellowfin Bream, Black Bream, Silver Bream, Pikey Bream. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Bream — Estuary all-rounder — the fish that taught a generation to lure-fish. Also called Yellowfin Bream, Black Bream, Silver Bream, Pikey Bream.
Bream eat what looks injured. The pause between twitches is doing more work than the twitch — a 5-second pause on a Sugapen will catch fish that a constant retrieve walks straight past. Their tournament catch-and-release rate sits above 95% because the species is so widely lure-targeted in AU.
Bream is also known as: Yellowfin Bream, Black Bream, Silver Bream, Pikey Bream. Estuary all-rounder — the fish that taught a generation to lure-fish.
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 Bream is in season for June. Click through for the live forecast.
Deeper reading on the species, the tides, the safety, and the timing windows behind the forecast.
Cast tight to structure — oyster leases, bridge pylons, rock walls, fallen timber — and work the lure back with subtle twitches. Bream eat what looks injured: pause, twitch, pause, sink. In dirty water after rain, dark-coloured plastics on heavier jig heads worked deep along channel edges are the play. The classic dawn / dusk surface session on flats in 0.5–1.5 m with a Sugapen is one of the most satisfying ways to catch them.
Run-in tides over the oyster racks and shallow flats are the prime windows — bream move up onto the flats to feed as the water comes up. Run-out tides work deeper channel edges as the water drops bream back into holes. Dead slack water is the worst time to fish.
Bream are weakly moon-dependent. Spring tides push more current and bring fish onto flats they otherwise can't access, which helps. The two or three days before a full or new moon during the late autumn spawning run is the famous "bream run" — schools of big breeders move down rivers to estuary mouths.
NSW: 25 cm minimum (yellowfin and black bream), Tarwhine 20 cm, bag of 10 in total, possession of 20 (NSW DPIRD Recreational Saltwater Fishing Guide 2024-25). QLD: 25 cm, bag of 30. WA black bream: 25 cm, bag of 4. The autumn spawning run is closed in some Victorian / Tasmanian river systems — check VFA closure dates.
NSW size & bag limits for Bream — current DPIRD limits, verified →
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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