#FishEagle: Weather playing games with fishermen

Rain fell throughout Sunday night, right up until early Monday morning.

The south westerly wind that had pumped all day long on Sunday resulted in wild seas and at first light on Monday morning the sea and surf were not looking too inviting.

Fortunately a north easterly light to moderate wind came through on Monday morning and continued throughout the day, so on Tuesday morning the fishing conditions were much improved again.

On Monday morning I decided to have a look at the popular angling beaches from the Tongaat River mouth all the way to the Umgeni.

What I saw were patches of dirty water all along and it certainly seemed as if a considerable amount of river water had entered the sea.

At the Umgeni mouth there were the usual piles of rubbish that had washed down river.

There had been complaints that the Umdloti lagoon was heavily polluted but on Monday morning the lagoon was totally empty.

It is no wonder that fishing is only a shadow of what it was in the past because fish will move away from polluted water and search for a cleaner environment.

I would suggest that people refrain from collecting mussels from the rocks for a while at least and the cray season is now open.

A south westerly wind began pushing through on Thursday morning which was light to moderate at first but it was plain to see that we would be in for some weather and this arrived early on Friday morning with a strong south westerly wind accompanied by rain that was heavy at times.

On Friday morning the sea was wild and it was obvious there would be little fishing over the weekend.

Summer is now behind us and the autumn season has begun and already one can feel the difference in temperature during the early mornings and first light is now later.

It is also the time of the year that the Indian Ocean island residents begin to prepare for the cyclone season.

The month of January this year was said to be the hottest ever recorded so the cyclone season could be really interesting.

Who can forget Demoina in the 1980s and all the damage that was caused?

The weather patterns have definitely changed and are difficult to predict, so planning fishing trips has also become difficult.

Rock and surf angling was quiet last week and although I had a look in at several popular fishing spots, the news was all negative.

Many of the local surf anglers are now persevering in the rocky areas but I believe that not much of note has been caught.

One or two anglers said that they were concentrating on fishing for pompano but they had not had much luck as yet. But when the water cleans up a bit, there will be every chance of pulling a nice pompano because the water temperature is still high.

I also had a look in at the Umhlanga and Durban North beaches but anglers also said that fishing was pretty quiet with just a few small fish being caught.

A couple of the popular Durban North angling spots are badly sanded up so the heavy weather of last week could do some good in that area.

Anglers fishing the early evening are still having some excellent sport with big sharks and the smaller grey sharks.

With all the dirty water about last week, offshore anglers fishing the shallow reefs had a tough time finding decent fish.

Some opted to travel out to the cleaner, deeper reefs where some decent dorado and bottom fish were caught.

I believe the South Coast bottom anglers have caught quite a few mussel cracker recently, plus some big rock cod and soldiers.

The problem is that the southerly winds have created currents out deep that make for difficult fishing.

Couta are still scarce and I am beginning to think that couta runs are a thing of the past and fish that do arrive in local waters are just a shadow of how it used to be.

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