Angling Report – 18 September 2015

The seine netters made some good hauls of sardines again last week with the last of the netting taking place on Thursday. It has been a bit of a strange sardine run this year with shoals of fish making an appearance and moving up the coast then disappearing for some time. Just as everyone thought that the run was over, the shoals suddenly appeared again – the last time in the Addington basin where netting has taken place over the last two weeks.

I can remember watching the netters as a young kid in the 1950s, facinated by how they operated. In those days the guys would row out to sea in wooden craft, encircle shoals of fish with their nets and then haul these nets ashore. In these nets there would be a wide variety of fish which included baitfish, shad, sometimes geelbek salmon and even barracouta and snoek. The catches would then be loaded onto trucks and hauled off to the fish market in Victoria street where they were prepared for sale to the public. Today these netters use rubber ducks that make their jobs far easier than that of their predecesors.

Surf and sea conditions were not all that bad last week until the south westerly began pushing on Thursday night. The wind reached gale force proportions even bringing some rain over the weekend. I am sure that there will be some dirty water for a few days now.

The shad were difficult to find last week but some fish were caught in the Umgeni and Glenashley areas. At the latter a few anglers caught limit bags of nice sized fish on Wednesday morning. The popular Virginia and Umhlanga beaches were also quiet with very few fish being landed.

Locally anglers found shad hard to come by with just a couple of fish being caught in the Ballito area – in front of the Fairmont hotel. The low water in the mornings did not help matters but the tides are much better for the early morning anglers this week.

Late afternoon anglers are pulling some big grunter from one or two of the Durban north beaches at the moment. Some guys even caught grunter on sardine baits at Glenashley on Wednesday morning whilst fishing for shad. The preferred bait is still sealice but I hear that anglers fishing in the bay are catching these fish on a variety of baits that have included cracker shrimp. Apparently fishing in the bay has really been productive recently with the light tackle anglers catching some really nice fish from charter boats. There have even been a few big garrick taken and one angler told me that he saw a monster grunter of 7kg being landed.

Local anglers have been having some excellent sport with grey sharks from the popular angling beaches. I even heard a rumour that there have been a few small rays around which is good news for the forthcoming summer season.

The local rock anglers are confirming that fishing has been a bit slow with just the odd small stumpie or copper bream coming out. Apparently there are plenty of small blacktail around that are making a nuisance of themselves by stealing bait meant for larger fish.

Sealice