Angling Report – 11 July 2014

It has been some time since I have seen almost perfect weather and surf fishing conditions for an entire week – which is what happened last week. There was hardly any wind during the days and anglers could not have asked for better conditions at night (although it was admittedly pretty cold).

I went fishing at first light twice last week and found that on both occasions there was a strong north to south undercurrent running. If your sinker did not roll across the bottom, it would become buried in no time because of the movement of the sand on the bottom. A friend confirmed that the same current was still running in the Umhlanga area on Saturday, making fishing difficult.

The shad continue to disappoint with just the odd fish being caught in the mornings in some local areas. Umhlanga looked promising for a while but has also gone a bit dead of late. News is that although the local beaches are also producing very few shad, things are looking rosier further north in the Zululand area. This is exactly what happened this time last year when the fish only came on the bite late in August locally. I have noticed this trend for some years now with small shad coming on the bite late in June and early July, only to disappear to start feeding up north. We end up with a situation where they are caught in the Bluff and Durban areas and up north, with nothing in between.

Because the weather was so good last week, I decided to ‘go walkabout’ and visit some of the popular rocky gullies and see for myself what the fishing was like. A couple of the local anglers in the Tongaat area told me that they had been catching some nice-sized yellowfin bream as they call them but I know them as Cape stump-nose. The anglers are catching these fish in the surf next to the rocks right in the shoredump. In another area, there were a couple of anglers fishing and they had caught one copper bream of around l.5 kg, a few blacktail and one guy pulled in a nice stonebream whilst I was on the rocks.

I also had a word with a couple of divers in the La Mercy area during the week and they told me they had seen one barracouta out in the deeper water plus a small shoal inshore. Although they had no fish, they did have some large crayfish they had caught beyond the backline. I asked about sharks, but the guys said they had not seen any in the area in which they had been diving. One of the divers said one of their friends had shot a couple of garrick in the Umdloti area during the week.

People were telling me last week that fishing along the South Coast was also a bit slow but the Umkomaas area looked the place to be with salmon and nice grunter being caught in the dark. Apparently, some of the grunter caught have been very nice-sized fish but one had to wait a while in-between bites. The problem with the popular south beaches at present is that one must expect a big crowd and the anglers far exceed the amount of fish caught.

Whilst I was writing this column on Sunday evening, a friend of mine phoned and said he had braved the cold and gone to Umdloti and caught a stumpie of 5kg whilst fishing for salmon with whole sardine.

Sealice

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