Angling Report – 5 June 2015

It has been a long time since I have last seen beautiful weather and sea conditions prevail for an entire week as was the case last week. There was hardly any wind to speak of so the sea was glassed off for most of the week. The water was also clean, but the inshore water did turn a bit green towards the end of the week.
The green water worked to the advantage of the backline anglers as these guys got into the snoek off Virginia beach and some nice fish were boated. This was a nice change because I had a word with several offshore anglers and they were all saying that the fishing was really quiet with gamefish very hard to find. There are still a few decent gamefish being caught down south and up north. One surf ski angler told me during the week that sharks have been a real problem of late and this was echoed by local ski boat anglers who said they were frustrated as just about every fish was lost to a shark.
After a slow start to the week, the surf angling improved with shad coming on the bite. I also heard that the anglers had some excellent fishing at the end of last week when the pompano came on the bite at the Tongaat river mouth. Some nice sized fish were caught, particularly on sealice baits. Pompano had also been caught in the Umhlanga and Durban North areas – again, the fish seems to have prefered sealice baits.
The shad have been feeding in the dark and although most fish caught have been over the legal limit, there have been some small one’s as well. This is a good sign because this time last year, there were no shad, but there were big blacktail on the bite. Apparently, some nice shad are being caught on the upper South Coast, but I have not heard anything about garrick being on the bite yet.
There is still no news of any sardines in the Eastern Cape waters and as one guy said to me, we will probably never see sardines again as we have done in the past. I have heard this from several people now but there is still time so we will just have to wait and see. What the guys are saying is that the shoals are not being allowed to gather as they are being sucked into the holds of foreign trawlers before they can move up the coast. I myself have heard the noise of diesel engines at sea during the early hours of the morning and it just seems strange that all of a sudden, anglers are not catching anything inshore at present.
I stopped at the side of the road at the Tongaat mouth on Saturday morning just to have a look at what was being caught and I quickly realized just how dangerous it is to stop at the side of the road in this area. The vehicles travelling towards Durban from the direction of Ballito are travelling at great speed around the last corner before entering the bridge over the river and all it would take to have a terrible accident would be a small error of judgement. I did not stay at the side of the road for very long.
A reminder to anglers is that when on a fishing trip to the beach, make sure that the correct licenses and ID documents are on your person because the conservation people are checking all anglers.

Sealice
Send your name, photo and the details of your catch to sport@northcoastcourier.co.za. Our “Catch of the week” winner receives a R300 voucher from our sponsor. Catches must be submitted within two weeks from being caught.