THE 113-DAY LOCKOUT - REGULATED BY NATURE

Patonga NSW

In the corporate world, there is a certain predictability to the work week. You might have a demanding boss, tight deadlines, or difficult clients, but generally speaking, the environment is controlled. If it rains on a Tuesday, the office doesn’t close. If the wind blows at 30 knots, the factory line doesn’t stop moving. You clock on at 9:00 AM, you clock off at 5:00 PM, and your income is a direct reflection of the hours you put in.

In the world of commercial fishing, that predictability is a fantasy.

We operate in an environment where we have zero control over the conditions of our workplace. We don’t choose our hours; the environment chooses them for us.

We have two bosses. One is the NSW Department of Primary Industries, which strictly regulates our licenses, our gear, and our calendars. The other is Mother Nature. And frankly, Mother Nature is the far more brutal tyrant of the two.

The central failure of the weekend and public holiday ban is that it assumes we can simply “reschedule” our work. It assumes that if we miss a catch on Saturday due to a closure, we can just pop out on Monday and make it up.

Anyone who has spent a life at sea knows this is nonsense. In our industry, a lost day is often lost forever.

The Phenomenon of the “Glass-Out”

There is a specific kind of psychological torture known only to commercial fishers: The Weekend Glass-Out.

Picture this. It has been blowing a gale all week. A southerly buster has churned the ocean into a washing machine, or a westerly has made the river choppy and unworkable. We have spent Monday to Friday tied up at the wharf, watching our bank balances drop and bills pile up. We are desperate to work.

Then, the forecast clears. Saturday morning dawns. The wind drops to zero. The swell flattens. The water turns to oil. It is a “glass-out”—the perfect, safe, productive fishing day. The prawns are running in the river; the garfish are schooling on the surface.

But because it is Saturday, we are legally grounded. We have to sit on the wharf, coffee in hand, and watch the perfect day burn away.

Then comes Monday. The bureaucratic gate opens. We fire up the diesel, untie the lines, and head out. But as we clear the heads, the wind swings. A 25-knot northeasterly kicks in. The window is gone.

This isn’t just bad luck; it is a systemic failure of regulation. By locking us out on specific calendar days, the government forces us to miss the safe days.

When the Barometer Drops: The East Coast Low

To understand why we need flexibility, you have to understand the violence of an East Coast Low.

On the Hawkesbury, these systems are not just “bad weather.” They are events that dismantle our entire operation. When the barometer crashes and the forecast turns purple, the priority shifts instantly from “earning a living” to “saving the boat.”

When an East Coast Low hits, the exposed moorings become death traps. The swell surges up the river, and the wind screams down the valleys. We don’t just stop fishing; we have to evacuate.

We band together, untie the fleet, and make the run for Refuge Bay.

Refuge Bay is exactly what it sounds like—a deep, sheltered pocket of water surrounded by high sandstone cliffs in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. It is one of the few places where a trawler can hide from a cyclone-strength southerly.

We take the boats in there and drop the heavy anchors. While we don’t stay on board for days, the anxiety never leaves us. We have to make dangerous runs back and forth in tenders—rain, hail, or shine—to check the boats. We are constantly monitoring the lines, checking for anchor drag, and ensuring our livelihoods aren’t being smashed against the rocks.

This isn’t a hypothetical fear. It is a memory burned into our minds. Years ago, not long after we had finished a major rebuild of the Lyndy, we woke to the phone call every skipper dreads. She had broken off her mooring in Refuge Bay during a violent storm and crashed onto the rocks.

That is the reality of our workplace. We are fighting to keep our assets afloat.

When the low finally moves off to the Tasman Sea, the work doesn’t just restart instantly. The ocean is a mess. The river is churned up. It might take another three days for the conditions to settle enough to shoot a net.

If that recovery period lands on a weekend, we are extended by another two days. A three-day storm becomes a nine-day financial disaster, simply because the government refuses to let us work the recovery days.

The Flood Years: When the Chemistry Changes

Then there is the rain.

In recent years, the NSW coast has been battered by repeated, catastrophic flood events. For a farmer, a flood ruins the crop on the land. For a fisher, a flood changes the chemistry of the water itself.

Prawns and squid are highly sensitive to salinity. They need a specific mix of salt and fresh water. When a massive flood turns the Hawkesbury into a torrent of fresh, chocolate-milk water, the target species don’t just hang around waiting to be caught. They run.

The fresh water pushes the prawns and squid out of the estuaries and towards the ocean, or into deep, specific holes where the saltwater wedge remains.

This creates two problems:

1. Inaccessibility: Sometimes, the flood pushes the stock into areas we are not allowed to fish—zoning restrictions, marine park boundaries, or rocky grounds where trawling is suicide for the gear.

2. The Timing Mismatch: Often, the “run” of prawns fleeing the freshwater happens fast. It might last 48 hours. If that run happens on a Saturday and Sunday, we miss it entirely. By Monday, the prawns are gone, washed out to sea and lost to the fishery forever.

We have watched millions of dollars of sustainable, high-quality seafood wash out the heads because we were forbidden from catching it during the critical 48-hour window when the salinity shifted.

The Ocean Reality: The South Coast Struggle

Down on the South Coast, fishers face the same battle, but with the added variable of the open ocean swell.

The garfish fishery is a surface fishery, but it relies on the ability to spot the fish and safely manoeuvre the boat. You cannot haul a net when the swell is standing up on the reefs.

Correspondence from the South Coast sector highlights exactly how these natural variables conspire with the weekend ban to wipe out a season. Records show a period around Easter where the “Double Regulator” effect destroyed the catch.

Here is the timeline of a disaster:

• The Lead Up: The fish were running, but the “Thursday before Good Friday” rule meant the fleet had to stop fishing to avoid spoiling the catch over the long weekend.

• The Closure: Then came the four-day Easter lockout. The boats sat idle.

• The Market Delay: Then came the delay in market reopening.

• The Blow: By the time the legal and logistical window opened again, an East Coast Low rolled in with big seas.

The season was effectively over. The fish had moved on or the conditions remained unfishable. The “effort days”—the days we were entitled to work—remained unused.

This is the key point the bureaucrats miss: Unused days do not roll over. We cannot bank a sunny day. We cannot save a school of fish for next month. If nature allows us to catch them, we must catch them then. If the calendar says “no,” that income is incinerated.

The Invisible Hazard: Debris and Gear

Let’s assume the stars align. The weather is good, it’s a Tuesday, and we are working. There is still one more variable that the office workers in Sydney don’t have to account for: The unseen hazard.

Following the floods, the river and the ocean floor are littered with debris. We are talking about massive gum trees, washing machines, rusted car bodies, and shipping containers that have been washed downstream and settled in the mud.

You can be having a great night. The prawns are coming in clean. Then, bang.

The winch screams. The boat lurches. We’ve hooked a submerged gum tree that wasn’t there last week.

In seconds, a $5,000 net is shredded. The trawl arms are bent. The gear is a tangled mess of wire and muddy timber.

The night is over. We have to winch the mess up, limp back to the wharf, and spend the next two days repairing the gear.

If that breakdown happens on a Thursday, we spend Friday fixing the net. We are ready to go again by Friday afternoon. But guess what? The weekend ban kicks in. We are now grounded for another 48 hours.

A simple snag on the bottom turns into a four-day loss of income. If we could fish weekends, we could repair the gear on Friday and be back out on Saturday to salvage the week. The ban takes away our ability to recover from mechanical and environmental bad luck.

The Safety Argument: “Go Fever”

There is a darker side to these closures, one that involves the safety of human life.

In aviation, they call it “Go Fever”—the psychological pressure to land or take off despite bad conditions because you are running out of time. The weekend ban creates “Go Fever” for fishers.

If we know that we are locked out of the river on Saturday and Sunday, and we see a marginal forecast for Friday afternoon—maybe the wind is a bit too strong, maybe the swell is a bit too high—we feel immense pressure to go anyway. We need to pay the mortgage. We need to pay the insurance. We can’t afford to lose the whole weekend, so we push the limits on Friday.

This is how accidents happen. This is how boats get in trouble.

If the ban was lifted, the pressure valve would release. If it’s blowing a gale on Friday, we can stay safe at the wharf, knowing that we can work on Saturday when the weather drops out.

Removing the weekend ban isn’t just an economic reform; it is a safety reform. It allows professional skippers to make decisions based on seamanship, not based on a government calendar.

The Verdict

We are already regulated by wind. We are regulated by swell. We are regulated by floods, debris, and the migration patterns of wild animals.

We accept these regulations. They are part of the job description. We respect the ocean, and we respect the power of nature.

What we do not accept is the artificial, arbitrary regulation of a calendar that ignores these realities. When Mother Nature gives us a window, the government should not slam it shut.

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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.