Also known as Yellowfin Bream, Black Bream, Silver Bream, Pikey Bream. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Hero spots in our coverage where Bream is in season for May. Click through for the live 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, bag of 5 (combined yellowfin/black). QLD: 25 cm, bag of 30. WA black bream: 25 cm, bag of 4. Check NSW DPI / QLD Fisheries / DPIRD for current rules. The autumn run is closed in some Victorian / Tasmanian river systems — check VFA closure dates.
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