Angling Report – 15 May 2015

There were some beautiful beach conditions on the first two days of last week before a southerly wind moved up the coast on Tuesday night and a big swell came up. Even though the weather was good, the surf was still fairly rough over the weekend.
In just a couple of weeks winter will be upon us and autumn will be just a memory. On talking to several local anglers, I do not think that this season would be one that they will look back on with fond fishing memories. Not many decent sized fish were caught, although there were great expectations back in the month of March. Although it is quite cool in the early mornings, it is still quite warm during the day and the sea water still remains very warm.
The only sizeable fish that I heard of last week was a stumpnose of around three to four kilos that was caught at the beginning of the week by an angler fishing in the Tongaat area. The stumpie was caught on sealice bait. There have been plenty of small pompano around so far this year, but the larger fish are scarce.
Most anglers that you talk to are hoping that there will be some sort of a sardine run this year. If the sardines do arrive, the winter fish will arrive with them. In the good old days when the sards used to arrive like clockwork, it was always the middle of June when the huge shoals would be spotted off the lighthouse at Port St Johns in the Transkei. During the past couple of years the experts said that the water temperature did not drop low enough to allow the fish to move up the coast. Time will tell but at present the sea water is still far too warm for the sardines.
Apparently anglers are catching plenty of shad in the Transkei and there have been a few garrick as well so this could be a sign of things to come in the near future. Looking at a few of the popular local shad angling spots, one cannot help thinking that there are going to be many disappointed anglers because some of these beaches are badly sanded up. Something drastic has to happen to move these sand banks as there has to be a channel to allow the shoals of shad to move inshore to feed.
The fishing along the South Coast beaches has also been a bit quiet the past few days, but this was to be expected with the heavy seas. One of my contacts that has been travelling down south said that he has not seen anything to really get excited about apart from a few small fish being caught from amongst the rocks.
Offshore angling has been quiet as well this week due to the sea conditions. One anglers said to me during the week that this year’s gamefish season has not been a good one for him and asked where have all the small shoal couta gone? We used to call these small fish ‘darts’ because they weighed in the region of three to four kilos and there would be big shoals of them on the reefs during the summer gamefish season.
Tides will be neaps this week so let us hope that the fishing improves.
Sealice