ABT founder and tournament bream regular Steve Morgan has banked a clean five-fish limit on Day One of the 2026 Daiwa BREAM Australian Open, working the Eastern Harbour zone of Sydney Harbour with a rotation of Cranka Crab, Eco Gear Aqua and stick minnow presentations that culminated in a closing fish-over-30 to secure his bag.
The Daiwa BREAM Australian Open remains the marquee event on the ABT national bream calendar, with three days of competition scheduled and the championship decided by aggregate bag weight at the final weigh-in. Morgan, posting Day One highlights to his Steve Morgan Fishing channel, gave a typically measured account of how the session unfolded.
"Well, it ended up being a great day for the first day of the three days of the Daiwa Bream Australian Open," Morgan said. "Spent all day in the Eastern Harbour and caught fish on a variety of baits. Got a couple of big ones on Cranka Crabs. Got a couple of really nice fish on Eco Gear Aquas. And my fifth fish over 30, which is what you need in the open, ate a stick minnow."
Under ABT bream rules, anglers may weigh a maximum of five legal fish and length minimums apply, so the day's economics revolve around upgrading bag-filler fish into kilo-class specimens. Morgan estimated 15 quality fish landed across the session — well short of the high-volume days that Sydney Harbour has been capable of in past years, but with enough upgrade material to assemble a competitive bag.
The first contact came on the Samaki Realistic MS40 long cast crankbait, a finesse hard body presentation that Morgan said he had previously not warmed to. The opening fish forced an immediate reassessment.
"A little bag filler to start off with on the Samaki Realistic MS40 long cast, in a colour I don't really like — but I'm liking it more now that something ate it," Morgan said.
The key big-fish session came on the Cranka Crab, the treble-rigged crustacean imitator that has earned an outsized share of the ABT-format upgrade fish over the last several seasons. Morgan landed two of his upgrades on Cranka Crabs, including one fish that worked him through structure, around a moored vessel and into multiple rock cracks before he could turn it boat-side on effectively two-pound terminal tackle.
"Now that's that's cheating seeing them off the edge like that," Morgan said. "There was a lot when they were fighting over it."
A second productive purple patch came on the Eco Gear Aqua, the slim profile soft plastic that has been a fixture on Australian bream circuits for two decades. Morgan dropped the bait beside a bow-waving fish in shallow water and described the eat in real time.
"Big one. Got him. Get out of there," Morgan called as the rod loaded. "Shaking his head the whole way out — got the Aqua wedge in his mouth."
The decisive fifth fish came on a stick minnow late in the session, the kind of opportunistic upgrade that defines tournament bream fishing where a single centimetre on the measuring board can be the difference between a top-ten cheque and missing the cut altogether.
Morgan resisted any temptation to overstate his fish, repeatedly correcting himself away from declaring kilo class and instead estimating sizes in the 700-gram range — the kind of conservative reporting that has long made his weigh-ins read as honestly as they fish.
"He's probably a good 700 grams, maybe," Morgan said of one late upgrade. "Get in there, boy. He's pretty well hooked."
The wider takeaway from the Day One footage is that Sydney's Eastern Harbour is fishing well enough to reward anglers willing to rotate through multiple lure styles and methodically upgrade rather than fill on small fish. With two days still to fish, Morgan's split-presentation template — crankbaits to find them, Cranka Crabs and Aquas to convert the better ones, and a closing stick minnow to seal the limit — has set the early target for the chasers behind him on the 2026 Daiwa BREAM Australian Open leaderboard.