Mr Tarrant is the third generation of a family of anglers from the Hunter. He has been chasing mullet for more than 41 years as they come out of the estuaries along the east coast and into the sea to spawn in an annual migration. Mr Tarrant's father and grandfather were mullet men; his dad still fishes with him, and his brother, two nephews, and his adult son Lee are part of his crew.

The mullet is a broad-headed fish with a silver belly that can grow to about 75 centimetres. An adult can weigh up to eight kilograms, and its distinct flavour and texture (and few bones) make it a popular table fish.

The mullet men wait on Stockton Beach for about six weeks from April each year as giant schools of the fish make their way out of the estuary around the Stockton break wall and follow the beach north. When that darkened patch is spotted from the sand, Mr Tarrant launches a boat from the shore to encircle the fish, releasing a 400-metre net as it crashes through the breakers. The boat returns to shore, the net is fixed to a vehicle, and the catch is hauled onto the sand where the crew quickly sort the fish into boxes and take them to a nearby co-op to be prepared for sale at the Sydney Fish Market.

The whole process relies on a crew of about eight or 10 working together in near-perfect organisation. Mr Tarrant could take in hundreds of tonnes of the species in a successful season. He describes his work as being no different from that of another primary producer, but instead of cattle or sheep, he makes his hay on fish.

On a grey and rainy day on April 4, Mr Tarrant and his crew were preparing for one of their first runs of the season when they spotted the characteristic dark patch of water just offshore. The boat was launched. The school of fish was surrounded and hauled in, but instead of his target mullet, the nets were filled with around five tonnes of Australian Salmon and a little over a tonne of Tailor.

The moment the school was spotted would prove critical for what came next - and would raise a crucial question about the generational angler's craft and experience. Can a commercial fisher standing on Stockton Beach - even one with more than four decades' experience - be expected to be able to identify the species of fish they're targeting from more than 50 metres away before they launch the boat?

In September 2021, the NSW Department of Primary Industries enacted a commercial daily possession limit on Tailor that allowed each endorsed license-holding ocean haul fisher to take a maximum of 100 kilograms of the fish in a bycatch (or non-targeted catch) during a day of fishing.

In a statement, the DPI said that ocean haul fishers and their crews were expected to be able to identify their targets before shooting their nets and to "visually verify" that their catch mainly consisted of that target species before it is brought up onto the beach.

"If there is a circumstance that prevents a fisher from identifying the species, then the haul crew should check the species while there is an opportunity to release the catch alive from the codend before hauling the net onto the beach," a spokesperson for the department said.

"If the catch exceeds a legal limit, then steps must immediately be taken to return the fish to their natural environment with the least possible injury."

Mr Tarrant doesn't target Tailor. Most fishermen in his trade don't. He says that the fish tend to chew and damage their nets when caught, often end up "mashed" or tangled around the gills, and die in the catch. To target Tailor, an angler on the NSW government's commercial fishing advisory board, CommFish NSW, said a typical mullet fisherman could expect to spend several days after a catch out of action, mending damaged nets.

"I don't want to shoot in Tailor," the angler, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorised to speak publicly, said, "You might catch those fish, but your net's destroyed. We don't have the gear for it; our light nets aren't built for (targeting Tailor)."

When Mr Tarrant launched his boat on April 4, he said the school he shot at was, by all accounts, behaving like his target fish.

"They have exactly the same characteristics," Mr Tarrant said, "They travel and migrate the same way. They were jumping like the mullet do. It was the Salmon that we shot at because you don't see the Tailor - they are on the bottom."

When the haul was brought up onto the sand, and Mr Tarrant realised what he had caught, he contacted the DPI and said a fisheries officer for the department told him to release the excess Tailor or leave them on the beach; according to the 2021 limit order, he and his crew could not have more than the bag limit of Tailor "in their possession".

He said many of the fish he had caught were mashed in the net and dead when they came ashore.

"(Fisheries officers) said to leave them on the beach," Mr Tarrant has claimed. "But if I were to leave them on the beach, I would be the worst person in the world. We can't leave fish on the beach; it's a bad look for the industry. Every time we have a shot, we clean all the fish off the beach."

Mr Tarrant ultimately took the haul to the Nelson Bay Fisherman's Co-Op, where he and his crew put the Tailor on an ice slurry to preserve them, then cleaned and graded them and prepared them to be shipped to market. Tailor is another popular table fish that last week was selling for nearly $20 per kilogram (or around $21 per fish) at the Sydney market.

Soon after, he says, a DPI fisheries officer arrived and seized around a tonne of fish caught above the bag limit. While Mr Tarrant says he escaped the potential fines for the illegal haul, he was effectively left out of pocket for labour and the potential thousands of dollars in revenue he could have otherwise made on the catch.

The department spokesperson confirmed as much on Monday, saying that fisheries officers "advised" Mr Tarrant to "follow the regulations and return any excess fish to the water with the least possible harm".

The seized fish were ultimately sold to the co-op, and the proceeds were returned to the DPI, the spokesperson said, adding that the department was continuing its investigation into the incident.

Mr Tarrant, however, argues that the legislation amounts to an effective catch-22. He says returning the fish to the water would ultimately see hundreds of kilograms of dead Tailor wash up on the sand and put him at the mercy of public disgust. Leaving the fish on the beach would amount to the same, and, he says, it made little sense to see such a large-scale wastage of what would otherwise be a saleable catch.

He says he and his crew were baulking at their work this week as they struggled to reconcile how to navigate what he feels is an onerous and impractical daily limit on one species of fish when other restricted bycatch species are regulated by an annual quota.

"We're here at Stockton Beach now," he said on Friday, April 12, "We're looking at fish coming to us now, and we've got blokes here all saying, 'What do you think they are? They look like mullet.'

"They could be sitting there, but they've got us worried that we can't shoot. We don't want to get caught again.

"I was doing the right thing, and with a bit of compassion ... we could have worked something out with the (department)."

Mr Tarrant doesn't take issue with bag limits on certain species but believes that a 12-month quota restriction as part of a total allowable catch, as with other species in his trade like eastern sea garfish and yellowtail scad, would be more practical than the daily limit set out in the 2021 order.

Under such a system, he says, he could have spaced out his haul of Tailor, which, over the week, would have been well under the restriction's threshold.

"I don't want to get caught," he said. "We have to get on well with the inspectors; I don't have anything to hide. I'm straight to the point with them and a straight shooter.

"Over three days, we could have taken that 900 kilograms anyhow. We could have taken 300 kilograms, hid another 300 kilograms in a cool room and snuck around, but we wanted to be honest with them."

In ideal conditions, on a perfectly clear day under a light wind, a highly experienced angler might be able to identify the species in a school of fish offshore by sight, but it would be difficult and unreliable, the CommFish board representative said. The school of fish they target more often appears like a loose blob of darkened space in the water. Moreover, the schools are rarely made up of entirely one species of fish - more often, several species swim together.

"We don't just fish in nice weather," the source said, "It's hard to tell, and the problem is that different fish swim together."

"A lot of the time, if you catch Salmon and you don't want them, you can let them go, and they will swim off. But Tailor mash themselves."

Twenty-five millimetres of rain fell over Newcastle on April 4 when Mr Tarrant took his bycatch of Salmon and Tailor. Heavy rain can dirty the waters, deterring fish from coming close to shore and making it difficult to see the school. The wet weather that hit the Hunter made for less-than-ideal fishing conditions.

As the haul was brought in, the anglers cut the nets to release the Salmon, but they were left at a loss as to what to do with the less hardy Tailor mashed and dead on the sand.

"The Fisheries officer said, 'Oh, you knew what you were shooting at'," Mr Tarrant said, "But there have been blokes doing this longer than I have, and every fisher on the coast would have at one time mistaken a patch of salmon for a patch of mullet."

Mr Tarrant has been chasing mullet since around 1983. He says it's in his blood and a family tradition he wants to uphold.

"It's a lot of hard work," he said, "You don't leave school and fall into a course to learn how to be an ocean haul fisherman; it's something that you're doing with your dad, that you learn to do when you're a kid.

"When (the law) says 'in your possession', that means you can't put it on your truck, so you're caught either way. You can't bury (the bycatch), you can't leave it on the beach," and, he says, he can't keep it.

"It's not going to be the last time it happens, either," Mr Tarrant said.