THE 113-DAY LOCKOUT

NSW commercial fishing weekend closures

Patonga NSW

The view from the Wharf

If you stand on the Patonga Wharf on a Saturday morning, the world looks perfect. The sun hits the water of the Hawkesbury River, the holidaymakers are setting up their umbrellas on the sand, and the smell of salt and sunscreen hangs in the air.

It is the kind of day that sells postcards. It is also the kind of day that breaks a fisherman’s heart.

I’m usually down there on the Lyndy, my prawn trawler. She’s a solid vessel—blue hull, white cabin, rigging standing tall against the headland. On a Saturday like this, I’m often on the deck, grease gun in hand, or checking the nets, doing the endless maintenance that keeps a commercial vessel safe.

Almost inevitably, a tourist will wander down from the ferry or the caravan park. They see the boat. They see the trawl arms. They see a fisherman working.

They smile, walk to the edge of the wharf, and ask the question that haunts every operator in this state: “Hey mate, any fresh prawns for sale today?”

I have to wipe the grease off my hands, look them in the eye, and say, “I’d love to sell you some. But I’m not allowed to catch them today.”

The confusion on their face is immediate. They look at the flat water. They look at the boat, ready to go. “Is something broken?” they ask. “Is the weather bad?”

“No,” I tell them. “It’s Saturday. The government says I can’t work.”

What they are running into, without knowing it, is the reality of NSW commercial fishing weekend closures.

The “Free” Fisher Myth

There is a romanticised idea of the commercial fisherman in Australia. The public imagines us as the last free agents—rugged individuals who wake up, look at the weather, and decide to chase the catch whenever the ocean allows.

The reality is starkly different. We are not free agents. We are food producers who have been placed on a rigid, bureaucratic roster that ignores the reality of nature and the demands of the market.

Whether it is a fisher chasing school prawns and squid in the Hawkesbury River, or a fisher chasing sea garfish 400 kilometres away on the South Coast, we are bound by the same archaic rule.

We are locked out of our own industry for 113 days a year.

The 113-Day Lockout

Most people are shocked when they see the raw data. When you run a small business, you assume you can open the doors whenever you are physically able to work. But for the Hawkesbury Prawn Trawl and the Ocean Haul Garfish sector, the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) effectively padlocks our factory gates every week.

We sat down and crunched the numbers for the 2025 calendar. Between mandatory weekend closures and NSW gazetted public holidays, our businesses face a staggering amount of downtime:

• 104 Weekend Days: Every Saturday and Sunday of the year.

• 9 Public Holidays: Including the critical periods of Easter, ANZAC Day, and Christmas.

• Total: 113 Days.

That is nearly one-third of the year where we are legally banned from earning an income.

Imagine telling a café owner they must close on weekends. Imagine telling a plumber he is illegal if he fixes a pipe on a Sunday. Imagine telling a farmer he cannot harvest his wheat because it’s a public holiday.

It wouldn’t happen. Yet, for the people responsible for putting NSW seafood on NSW plates, this is our “business as usual.”

The Christmas and Easter Paradox

For the Hawkesbury fishery, this restriction is particularly cruel because of what we catch.

Prawns and squid are not just protein; they are cultural icons. They are “celebration food.” When do Australians want to eat fresh prawns? They want them at Christmas. They want them on Australia Day. They want them on Good Friday.

But under the current rules, these are the exact times we are often banned from working.

In the lead-up to Christmas, the demand for Hawkesbury River prawns is insatiable.

Prices are strong, and the community wants local product. But if Christmas falls near a weekend, or during the public holidays, we are tied up at the wharf. We are forced to watch the peak demand window slam shut while our boats sit idle.

The same happens at Easter. A fisher on the South Coast sees this with the Garfish run. April is often the peak season for garfish—when the schools are thickest and the quality is highest.

However, April is also a minefield of closures. In 2025, due to the clustering of Easter and ANZAC Day, commercial fishers will lose 11 days in a single month. That is nearly 40% of the month lost to red tape.

We are forced to fish frantically on the Thursday before Good Friday, knowing that whatever we catch has to last the market through a four-day long weekend. By the time you buy that fish on Easter Monday, it is four days old. If we were allowed to work, you could be eating seafood caught that very morning.

The “Lyndy” is a Factory, Not a Hobby

To the untrained eye, the Lyndy might just look like a picturesque part of the scenery. She is a classic timber trawler, painted in sharp white with striking blue gunwales. Her high, flared bow is built to punch through the river chop, and her tall outrigger booms reach up into the sky, holding the heavy stabilizer “birds” that keep her steady in a swell.

She looks peaceful sitting on the mooring. But to a bank manager or a business owner, she is a floating asset worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The deck is not a lounge area; it is a workspace packed with heavy industrial steel. Dominating the deck is the winch—not a modern hydraulic system, but a mechanical workhorse driven by a Farmall A tractor gearbox. She is a machine designed for one purpose: sustainable food production.

Like any factory, it has fixed costs that do not care what day of the week it is.

• Insurance: We pay 365 days a year.

• Mooring Fees: We pay 365 days a year.

• Maintenance: Saltwater doesn’t stop corroding metal on Sundays.

• Engine depreciation: Time and tide wait for no man.

No other industry in Australia would accept a regulation that forces a capital-intensive asset to sit idle for 30% of its lifespan for no scientific reason.

We are trying to run modern, efficient, sustainable businesses. We operate under strict government management plans designed to ensure sustainability.

The Ocean Haul Eastern Sea Garfish fishery is quota managed. A hard annual cap (TACC) is set on how much can be taken, and individual operators are allocated quota within that limit. Once the quota is caught, we stop.

The Hawkesbury Estuary Prawn Trawl fleet faces a battery of other restrictions, including gear limitations, bycatch reduction devices, spatial closures and effort controls.

In both cases, the sustainability lever is already built into the system:

For garfish, it is the total allowable commercial catch.

For prawns, it is the combination of gear, area and effort limits.

Yet in the garfish sector many operators still struggle to reach their quota. Not because the fish are not there, but because the best weather and the strongest demand often fall on days that are closed to them.

Take the lead up to Easter. It is one of the biggest seafood peaks of the year. The weather can be stable, the fish are schooling and the market is crying out for fresh local product. But under the weekend closure a large slice of that window is simply off limits. Boats are tied up at the very moment when they could safely fish and legitimately work towards filling their quota.

Then the knife twists. At the end of the year, the unused quota is held up as evidence that the stock is fragile or the fish are “not available to the fishery”. The system blocks us from fishing, then uses the shortfall it creates as proof that the same restrictions must stay in place.

That is why the weekend ban is a redundancy. It does not save fish; it just kills our flexibility.

If a garfish operator lands a tonne of fish on a Sunday instead of a Tuesday, it still counts against the same fixed quota. The total annual catch does not change by a single kilogram.

If a Hawkesbury trawler uses one of their restricted fishing nights on a Sunday instead of a Tuesday, the impact on the stock is exactly the same. The only difference is that the weekend ban stops us from working when the weather is safe and the market is hungry.

A Tale of Two Fisheries

We come from different worlds. Some of us work the estuaries – the muddy, nutrient rich waters of the Hawkesbury, trawling for prawns in the dark, navigating tides and river traffic. Others work the ocean – hauling nets for garfish in the open swell, dealing with the vagaries of the South Coast winds.

But we are united by this single, nonsensical restriction.

We are not asking for a handout. We are asking for the right to go to work under the same modern, science based rules that already limit how much we can catch, without outdated NSW commercial fishing weekend closures turning our working boats into weekend ornaments.

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Keep an eye out for the next parts in The 113-Day Lockout series. We’ll dig deeper into how these closures were created, what they mean for local seafood on your plate, and the reforms we’re calling for. If you care about real NSW fish on NSW tables, don’t miss what comes next.