Non Technical Summary

Lake Macquarie is the largest coastal lagoon in New South Wales and is situated between the State's two largest urban population centres. The lake contains large populations of fish and crustaceans that support substantial commercial and recreational fisheries. The allocation of fisheries resources between recreational and commercial user-groups has long been a contentious issue in Lake Macquarie. Long-term datasets which quantify the declared commercial production for Lake Macquarie are maintained by NSW Fisheries, however, there is no comparable dataset that quantifies the fishing effort or harvest of the recreational sector. Thus, there was a need to undertake a recreational fishing survey to collect essential information for assessing the status of the fisheries resources and the quality of the recreational fishery in Lake Macquarie.

The recreational fishing survey was done during the annual period, March 1999 to February 2000. We found that the recreational fishing population of Lake Macquarie was dominated by males. Over 82% of the boat-based fishers and over 83% of the shore-based fishers interviewed were male. We found that the great majority of fishers interviewed were of local origin, ranging from about 75% in the shore-based fishery to about 80% in the boat-based fishery. We recorded a large amount of daytime recreational fishing effort (about 970,400 fisher hours) in Lake Macquarie and Swansea Channel during the survey year. This amount of fishing effort is relatively large when compared to other estuarine studies. This indicates that the Lake Macquarie fishery is an extremely important and popular recreational fishery, despite complaints from recreational fishers about perceived declines in the quality of this fishery. We estimated that the daytime recreational harvest from the Lake Macquarie fishery was about 295 tonnes (approx. 27 tonnes - approx. SE), which was about 8% larger than the declared commercial catch, and consisted of about 913,500 fish, crabs and squid (approx. 65,700 individuals - approx. SE) from 60 taxa. The bulk of this harvest was made up of blue swimmer crab (approx. 108.9 tonnes), luderick (approx. 35.4 tonnes), yellowfin bream (approx. 32.5 tonnes), dusky flathead (approx. 21.4 tonnes), common squid (approx. 17.9 tonnes), sand mullet (approx. 13.8 tonnes), trumpeter whiting (approx. 12.4 tonnes), yellow-finned leatherjacket (approx. 10.2 tonnes), snapper (approx. 8.7 tonnes) and tailor (approx. 7.4 tonnes). These ten taxa, by weight, accounted for about 91% of the daytime recreational harvest during the survey period, indicating that the recreational harvest was very selective. This relatively large daytime recreational harvest was achieved even though a large proportion of fishing parties were unsuccessful and did not retain any fish, crabs or cephalopods. The proportion of unsuccessful boat-based fishing parties was about 42% overall (ranging from about 32% to 49% on a seasonal basis), and the proportion of unsuccessful shore-based fishing parties was about 61% overall (ranging from about 54% to 68% on a seasonal basis).

We concluded that the recreational fishery in Lake Macquarie was relatively productive and providing good quality recreational fishing opportunities because: (a) the levels of daytime recreational fishing effort were high; (b) the success rates (harvest rates) recorded were similar to those reported for other estuarine recreational fisheries in NSW, (c) the size-frequency distributions of important recreational species showed that large individuals were in the recreational harvest; (d) the proportions of under-sized fish in the recreational harvest were comparable to rates measured in other NSW estuarine fisheries; and (e) the daytime recreational harvest of many important recreational species was greater than that taken by the commercial sector.