Angling Report – 8 January 2016

Another festive season over and I think that local anglers will be happy to get back to some sort of normality after the rush on the beaches especially during the New Year weekend.
Leading up to the Christmas weekend the weather was not really favorable for anglers with winds pushing early in the mornings and the rain during the weekend. But the week leading up to New Year was almost perfect and anglers had some quality fishing time on the beaches and at sea.
I saw a number of shad being caught during the holidays and although many of the fish were on the small side, there were some decent sized shad caught as well. The early mornings just at first light proved to be the best time because the shad did not remain on the bite for too long and anglers arriving at the beach late usually lost out and found small blacktail and a few karranteen on the bite. It was actually surprising to see a few karranteen at this time of the year because usually anglers would catch this species during the winter months and also these fish are far and few between nowadays.
I also saw a couple of nice copper bream caught during the holidays. It has been quite an amazing run of these fish, whereas in the past it was quite hard work to find where the copper bream were feeding. One of my local angling friends stopped off at my house last weekend and showed me a very nice pompano of 5kg that he caught in the Tongaat area on ghost crab bait. This angler said that he had hooked and lost a couple of big fish in the rocky area that he was fishing and all the pulls had been when using live crab.
There were a number of holidaymakers fishing the local beaches and they told me they were enjoying their fishing and the summer flatfish they were targeting. One angler showed me a photo on his phone of a very nice honeycomb ray that he had caught in the Umhlanga Rocks area where apparently anglers have had some great fun during the holidays. There have been quite a few small shad on the bite in this area and the holidaymakers have been using these fish for live baits and sliding them out looking for the larger inedibles.
Deep sea anglers have been busy as well and although the weather has not always been ideal, some really nice gamefish have been caught. A couple of big barracouta have been caught in local waters but it has been the dorado and yellowfin tuna that have made up the numbers. It has been another excellent season for these two species of gamefish. Some big tunny have been caught on live bait which seems to be plentiful at present and dorado can be found almost anywhere.
Unfortunately there are some big sharks around as usual at this time of the year and one fishing ski angler found a great white in the Stud Rock area that took a liking to his ski and chewed on the bow section. Anglers fishing the Umdloti area have lost some nice fish to sharks, so much so that some of them are now giving this area a miss and are fishing amongst the ships anchored off Durban for wahoo. A couple of billfish have also been caught off Durban so it seems as if the gamefish season is picking up nicely. It is a pity that there are still not too many couta about, although anglers on the South Coast are pulling a few.
An old deep sea angling friend of mine told me this year’s daga salmon run was a little disappointing as most of the fish they caught were on the small side, ranging from 10 to 12kg. He said that although they are still catching a few fish in South Coast deep waters, it has become harder to find the big fish.
Sealice