Parra river mullet

[Little_Flatty]

Hi all,

On this sunny lockdown day, I'm pondering...mullet.

I see them regularly (both poddies and full grown) in my local haunts on the Parramatta river (anywhere from Iron Cove to Ermington). I've long given up on catching the big ones in the Parra, and in any case I'm mostly interested in poddies for bait anyway. But the ones I've seen there, I haven't been able to catch or trap.

I've never had an issue catching/trapping poddies in places like Narrabeen lake and Berowra waters, but really struggle closer to home. Tried bread and prawn baits with no success.

What's going on? I have heard ponderings on this site that 9 times out of 10, any mullet caught by hook in NSW are sand mullet, whilst the 'uncatchables' are sea/bully mullet. Maybe it's the species? I'd love to have a source of bait closer to home. I occasionally come across herring (the scaly flat/deep bodied variety, which look a bit like the ones cast-netted in the tropics), which make good baits, but have thus far found them a bit unreliable.

Curious to see if anyone has experienced success getting mullet on the Parra, other than the odd fluke catch.

Cheers

Mike

[JamoDamo]

The herring are amazing for unweighted bream bait, good flesh baits too but depends on the day for using them as dead bait however live herring are possibly one of the best big flathead / jewfish livebaits you can get. In my early days on fishraider me and my mates used to livebait herring for flathead and the live and every weekend we would get absolutely roflstomped..