Also known as Kuparu, St Peter's Fish, Dory. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
John dory — Slow, ugly, and worth every minute — a live-bait ambush specialist. Also called Kuparu, St Peter's Fish, Dory.
John dory is also known as: Kuparu, St Peter's Fish, Dory. Slow, ugly, and worth every minute — a live-bait ambush specialist.
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 John dory is in season for June. Click through for the live forecast.
Out of season across our covered spots in June.
John dory are ambush predators that hang almost motionless near the bottom and inhale live baitfish with that telescopic mouth — so the whole game is putting a livie in front of one and waiting. The Hauraki Gulf is JD country: work the same foul ground, channel edges, mussel farms, wharf piles and bait-holding structure where you find jack mackerel, because where the bait lives, the dory follow. Catch a few live jacks on a sabiki first, then send one down on a light running rig or a stinger setup near the bottom and be patient — the bite is a slow, heavy 'load-up' rather than a sharp take, so feed it a moment, let it eat the bait, then come up tight gently. They have no real fight and a soft mouth, so it's a steady lift, not a hookset, and they tend to plane and use their flat body near the surface, so net them rather than risk pulling the hook. Slow-worked soft-baits and slow-jigs drifted through bait schools pick up plenty too, especially fished agonisingly slowly.
Light current is a john dory's friend — they're not built to chase bait in a strong rip, so the most productive windows are the slacker water around the tide turn and the gentler flow of the neap tides, when bait sits quietly over structure and the dory can stalk it. In the Gulf the hour either side of the change, fished right on the bottom near bait-holding foul, is prime. Heavy spring-tide flow tends to push both bait and dory off the structure and makes it hard to keep a livie in the strike zone.
John dory aren't a moon-driven target in any strong sense — being slow, structure-bound ambushers, they're far more dependent on the presence of live bait than on the lunar phase. If anything the smaller neap tides around the quarter moons can fish better, because the lighter current suits both the bait and the dory's hunting style. Concentrate on finding the bait schools and fishing a clean live bait slowly; the moon is a minor consideration next to that.
John dory in New Zealand fall under the general recreational finfish rules, with a daily bag limit and no minimum legal size at the time of writing, though limits are area-based and reviewed periodically. As always, check the current Fisheries New Zealand rules (or the NZ Fishing Rules app) for the exact area before keeping fish. John dory are also caught in southern Australia, where each state sets its own recreational limits — confirm the local rules if you're fishing those waters.
NZ size & bag limits for John dory — Auckland & Kermadec area, verified →
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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