LIKE many others, I have fond memories as a young kid chasing eastern king prawns in the coastal lakes on the south coast during the Christmas holidays.
Word would pass around that the prawns were “running”, and my dad and grandad would descend on the lake with their hurricane lanterns and drag net while I messed around with a dip net and torch. Whilst I was no danger to the prawns, we would usually get a feed and have a lot of fun in the process.
Eastern king prawns are a common resident in the lakes, lagoons and rivers of NSW, being most abundant over the summer months. Adolescent king prawns leave the estuaries in late summer and autumn, spend a brief period of time in the shallow coastal waters where they begin maturing, and then start a mammoth migration toward the spawning grounds off northern NSW and southern Queensland. The eggs and larvae drift south in the East Australian Current, and recruit back into estuaries to start the process all over again.
The abundance of king prawns in many of southern NSW estuaries can be highly variable. This can arise from variable ocean currents (affecting the supply of young prawns from the north), but in the most extreme cases when the estuary mouth is closed to the sea at particular times of the year no young prawns may make it into that system at all. The best example of this is Wallagoot Lake, near Tathra, which remained cut-off from the sea for about 17 years until 2012. Following closure of the entrance, any prawns that made it in, became trapped in the lake, growing bigger and bigger until they succumbed to harvest by fishers or died through natural causes.
Eastern king prawns post larvae.
In 2007 and 2008, Department of Primary Industries (DPI) researchers conducted a trial stocking of Wallagoot Lake with eastern king prawn post larvae. Millions of baby prawns were released into the productive and habitat-rich waters of the lake, and it wasn’t long before anglers started reaping the benefits.
Following these earlier trials, DPI have carried out a stocking program in December 2014 and released prawns into a number of estuaries in the southern half of NSW. In the first year, this program has resulted in almost 4,000,000 baby prawns being released across Curalo Lake, Back Lake, Wallagoot Lake, Lake Tabourie, Burrill Lake, Swan Lake, Narrabeen Lagoon, Wamberal Lagoon and Khappinghat Creek.
Based on the growth rates seen in the stocking trials in Wallagoot Lake, prawns should be catchable by late February, and getting to a good size by late March.
Prawns have been stocked in several estuaries in NSW.
If you are holidaying around these estuaries in 2015, it might be worth packing the old dip net and torch, and try your luck catching a feed of the tastiest of prawns.
This is another program run using funds from the NSW Recreational Fishing Trust.
