Angling Report – 7 February 2014

Blustery north easterly and southerly winds, together with some rain at times kept many anglers off the beach last week, although the weather did improve somewhat over the weekend. The rock and surf anglers caught mainly inedibles as the inclement weather restricted fishing to short periods in the early mornings. I did however hear of couple of anglers that had some success trapping decent sized snoek fishing into the deeper water from the rocks in the Salt Rock area at first light. On Saturday morning I saw an angler land a nice pompano in the Tongaat area. The fish was caught mid-morning on a rising tide, using sealice as bait. The fisherman in question told me that he has had excellent success with sealice lately and that he has been catching them in the Umdloti area.
My mates in Umhlanga said that quite a few fish were caught in this area last week, but the weather had restricted fishing times. One of them said that he had managed to get onto the rocks just north of the lighthouse as it was leap tides and had caught three snoek on spoon. The snoek weighed three to four kilos each.
Bruce Long went for another dive on Saturday morning and said that although the water looked clean, the visibility was quite poor below the surface due to weeds and other debris. He spent about an hour in the water without finding anything to take a shot at but confirmed that he did see several big skates on the bottom. He stopped at a couple of the surf ski launch sites on his way home, but apparently they also did not have much luck.
My friend Arthur fished with Basil Harrison on his ski boat on Saturday and they managed to catch four sizeable tunny off Ballito. Prior to catching the tunny however they had travelled out deep in search for the dorado, but found nothing at all. Offshore anglers fishing the Westbrook area caught a couple of couta over the weekend on live bait and one surf ski angler told me that the guys fishing with lures did not even have a pull. I heard that the sharks are still around and several fish were lost to these predators at the weekend.
The Durban deep sea grounds are said to have produced some decent gamefish recently. Snoek seem to be making up the bulk of catches, with the odd wahoo and couta making an appearance from time to time. Billfish anglers also had several strikes from marlin and sailfish.
The weather forecast does not look too promising for the coming week, but hopefully things will have cleared up by the weekend. All the rain that fell inland last week could also see the rivers come down in flood and dirtying the water close to the coast which will certainly hamper fishing.
Sealice