Angling Report

Fishing conditions were not at their best at the beginning of last week because of the bad weather at the weekend and it took a few days before the surf settled. Another West came through and angling was out of the question again. Fortunately, by Friday morning fishing conditions improved and anglers were looking forward to the weekend.
As expected, the fishing was quiet during the first half of the week because of adverse conditions but as the water calmed, so the anglers were back on the beach and found fish on the bite again. A friend visited the Glenashley area on Friday, found promising surf conditions and proceeded to throw a spoon. He had four throws and landed four nice shad with anglers in the area also catching fish on bait. On hearing the news, my brother decided to have a few throws the next morning and he was on the beach well before first light. He pulled his first shad at around 5.45am in the dark, missed another and never had another bite on sardine. At 7am anglers fishing in the area with sealice bait started pulling pompano throw for throw. Every sealice bait that was cast into the water produced a pompano, some of the fish weighing between two to three kilos. One angler finished up the morning with nine pompano and the other anglers fishing with sealice caught pompano as well. My brother just sat on the beach and watched because he had come to the beach prepared to catch shad with sardine bait. He said that in all the years that he had been fishing in the surf, he had never seen the pompano feeding as they were that morning. Sea conditions were ideal for pompano on Saturday morning. The surf was fairly flat and the water nice and clean. The small pompano have been on the bite for some time now and anglers have been catching these fish in several areas, so maybe this is the year of the pompano. Last year it was the year of the copper bream and the bronzies before it was the turn of small brusher that were also caught in numbers along the coast.
The shad are becoming more numerous now with some really nice fish being caught with several anglers complaining that they have had traces bitten off by the larger fish. It seems as if the anglers that arrive on the beach well before first light are the guys that have been scoring best of all and limit bags have been recorded. It must be remembered that the shoals of shad are moving all the time so it is not uncommon for shad to be caught during the day as pockets of these fish move inshore to feed. Unfortunately more and more anglers are fishing for shad and fishing can become very unpleasant when there is a big crowd. This is why it is sometimes difficult to get news of nice sized fish being caught because the experienced anglers try to keep the news quiet.
A lot of garrick have been caught in the Tugela area along with some big shad and a few salmon. Live baits, spoon, plugs and other lures have all been working and some large fish have been landed. Local anglers should try the river mouths and although they may have to be a bit patient, they should catch a garrick or two especially on the outgoing tide period. The garrick make a beautiful pickled fish.
The South Coast gamefish anglers have been catching some really big couta recently and I heard this week that a monster of 54kg was caught. This is just a couple of kilos short of the record that was set many, many years ago. Unfortunately the sea has been bumpy for much of last week and this kept the local anglers off the water but conditions should be more favourable this week.
Sealice