#FishEagle: Grey sharks dominate the water

It was another week of turbulent weather conditions with winds, mostly from the south, bringing more rain with heavy falls in some areas causing flooding.

Inevitably this muddied the sea water, especially around the river mouths, and the current further distributed the murkiness over a wide area.

Finding clean water was a bit of a problem. The sea water temperature has remained high and during the latter part of last week it measured a high 27 degrees – great for bathing but not so for angling.

Some species tend to develop parasites, which include worms in the flesh, which is not great.

The unusually high rainfall has resulted in swollen rivers and the Tugela River is now flowing stronger than it has been for some time.

This means that fishing at the mouth is a no go, plus the other lower North Coast rivers are also really running strong again. Anglers looking for clean water may have to wait a while before considering fishing again as there will be a lot of debris and weeds in the water, making fishing impossible.

The dirty water line is stretching quite far out to sea, so the inshore angling reefs will probably just produce sharks.

Chatting to local regular rock and surf anglers during the week, they all told me that fishing was quiet and the changing weather did not help.

One said he had caught a number of karranteen, which was a surprise considering the water temperature.

It seems as though grey sharks have arrived in numbers and are being caught at a multitude of venues during late afternoons. Once these sharks move into the surf all else disappears and even the sandies and rays were a bit shy.

Offshore anglers remarked there seemed to be an unusual number of sharks in the fishing grounds at present.

The Durban North beaches produced just the odd fish during the week, mostly inedibles such as the odd sand shark and small skate.

Offshore anglers have reported plenty of shoals of bonito off Durban at present, which is excellent news for those into their marlin fishing.

Apparently a few snoek were caught off Umdloti but they were not as active as they have been recently.

Local anglers who found some clean water north of Ballito managed to catch the odd big couta but landing hooked fish was almost impossible because of all the sharks.

The fish have been nailed soon after being hooked and a couple of decent snoek were taxed as well.

The long-term weather report for this week is one of more settled conditions and not much rain is forecast.

Unfortunately anglers may have to ‘duck and dive’ a bit to find decent angling conditions but if clean water is found, there will be the possibility of nice sized pompano moving inshore, especially with the water temperature as high as it is.

Areas to try for this species is the Ballito, Salt Rock and northern Westbrook areas.

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