Bait shops sell frozen prawns in two basic styles - cooked, off-the-shelf supermarket grade, and uncooked, snap-frozen specialty packs from local processors. Sydney YouTuber Fish'n with Dave spent the last 48 hours showing why the distinction matters.
In a session uploaded on the morning of May 10, Dave swapped his usual pilchards for a single packet of Tweed Bait Hawkesbury prawns - the uncooked, snap-frozen variety - and fished them through a Port Hacking afternoon and a Cronulla wharf dawn. The results were small fish, in volume, with one notable bait robber in the form of a tailor that bit the hook clean off mid-retrieve.
"I just bought one, but I was going to get pilchids, but I ended up getting some Hawkesbury prawns," Dave said at the start of day one. "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 Dave draws between cooked and uncooked is the practical takeaway for any reader still using the off-the-shelf option.
"Some of the prawns you get, those cooked ones, I don't rate them," he said. "I've used them before. They're not that great."
The Tweed Bait Hawkesburys, threaded whole onto a 1/0 baitholder hook for the medium rod and halved on a smaller hook for the light, were getting bites within minutes. The first cast on the light rod produced a small snapper before Dave's bail arm had time to settle.
The Port Hacking afternoon turned into a parade of small fish - undersized snapper, school bream, an unwanted leather jacket - punctuated by larger predators busting up bait in the periphery without ever taking a bait. Dave watched a school of what he thought were Australian salmon slide past his metal jig, look it over and refuse, and concluded the colour did not match the bait fish in the column.
"Maybe I need to switch over to the white one because it looks too different from what they're eating," he said.
The pivot that paid was prawn. On day two at Cronulla wharf - 4 am, dropping a one-gram arging jig under UV-charged lights for fresh yellowtail to live-bait kingfish - Dave tipped the tiny hook with a sliver of leftover prawn from the day before. The first take did not feel like a yellowtail. It was a 34 cm trevally.
"Oh, good bite. Got him. Oh, I don't think that's a yaka," Dave said. "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 followed almost immediately. Then the bite died. No yellowtail, no kingfish and no anglers around him hooking up either. Dave called the morning weird rather than disappointing and packed up before the sun was properly up.
The verdict, taken across both days, is qualified but worth noting. Tweed Bait's uncooked Hawkesbury prawns held up well enough on the hook to fish through pickers, brought up bream and snapper consistently and survived enough return casts to do a session's work without turning into mush. The bigger fish remained the user's problem - the right colour metal, the right time, the right tide.
For recreational Sydney anglers facing the same servo-fridge choice on the way to a pre-work session, the headline is simple. Avoid the cooked supermarket prawns. The uncooked, snap-frozen specialty packs - Tweed Bait among them - are doing the work.