Also known as Blackie, Black. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Hero spots in our coverage where Black Marlin is in season for May. Click through for the live forecast.
Out of season across our covered spots in May. 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 2026-05-14.
Fishare tracks your home spots and pings you when the next 3-hour peak window opens. Log catches and blanks to teach the model your local patterns. Free forever for everyone who joins now.
Open Fishare