Sydney YouTuber Fish'n With Dave spent his last 48 hours trying to answer a question every estuary angler eventually asks: are frozen prawns actually any good as bait?
In a video uploaded on the morning of May 10, Dave fished two of his home stretches - Port Hacking on a midday weekday window and Cronulla wharf at first light the following day - using nothing more exotic than a packet of Tweed Bait Hawkesbury prawns from the local servo. The verdict is qualified, but the bites kept coming.
"I just bought one, but I was going to get pilchids, but I ended up getting some Hawkesbury prawns," Dave told the camera at his first stop. "So, we'll see how the prawns go just for something different. Always flicking pilchards and stuff. I thought I'll give the Hawkesbury prawns a go."
The distinction he draws between cooked and uncooked frozen prawns is the practical takeaway. Dave avoids the cooked supermarket variety on the basis that they have not produced for him historically.
"Some of the prawns you get, those cooked ones, I don't rate them. I've used them before. They're not that great," he said.
The Tweed Bait Hawkesburys, threaded whole onto a size 1/0 baitholder hook on the medium rod and halved on a smaller hook on the light, were taking bites within minutes. The first cast on the light rod produced a small snapper before the bait had even properly settled.
"First cast," Dave said. "Hopefully there's not a heap of these guys taking the bait."
The afternoon settled into a pattern of small fish - undersized snapper, school bream, leather jackets and one solid trevally that bit the hook clean off as Dave was reeling in to check his bait. Bust-ups of larger predators kept appearing in the periphery, but never in casting range.
"Even though the weather's atrocious, sort of the perfect time to fish," he said as bait fish boiled across the surface. "The tide's running in. It's coming into high tide here. That's when this place shines."
A brief lure session with a 30g Halco Twisty and a 10g Mol-osi Marksman drew follows but no commitments from what Dave guessed were Australian salmon, after a school slid past, examined his metals and refused. He blamed a colour mismatch with the bait fish in the water.
"Maybe I need to switch over to the white one because it looks too different from what they're eating," he said.
Day two was a 4 am alarm and a Cronulla wharf session built around catching fresh yellowtail to use as live bait for kingfish. Working a tiny one-gram arging jig under UV-charged lights, he dropped the size down further and tipped the hook with a sliver of leftover prawn from the day before.
The trick worked, but not for the species he expected.
"Oh, good bite. Got him. Oh, I don't think that's a yaka," Dave said as a 34 cm trevally hit the deck. "Wow. Bet it's a true. There he is. I knew it was a trout. He's a good one. Just on the bit of prawn. Tiny hook."
A second trevally of similar size followed, then the bite died completely. No yellowtail, no kingfish, no surface action and no anglers around him hooking up either. The session wrapped early and Dave called the morning weird rather than disappointing.
The prawn verdict, taken across both days and a respectable variety of small species, is that Tweed Bait's frozen uncooked Hawkesburys hold up well enough on the hook to fish through pickers, bring up bream and snapper consistently and survive the return cast. The bigger fish remain the user's problem.