#FishEagle: Let the good times roll

It was back to good times for anglers as last week’s expected windy weather failed to meterialise.

Offshore and rock and surf anglers found favourable conditions in the light winds during the day, which became even calmer after last light.

Swell readings at sea measured around one meter with the water temperature between 22-23 degrees.

Offshore anglers again found barracouta on the bite. A few big couta were found feeding in the Stud Rock area at Westbrook and at other popular areas.

Although sharks claimed some hooked fish, the good news is that they seemed to becoming fewer in number.

Perhaps the sharks are beginning to move camp south to intercept the sardine shoals and will certainly not be missed.

The winning fish at the recent Durban Ski Boat Club festival took the angler an hour to subdue, and during that time there were no signs of shark activity.

Early last week a photograph posted showed hundreds of birds diving off the Kei River Mouth but it could not be confirmed what they were feeding on.

Word from the bottom reefs anglers last week were of some decent reds and rockcod caught but the fishing was described as ‘up and down’. Some days fish were difficult to find.

Bonito is all over the place though and anglers are now labelling them as pests, but one or two big couta recently caught were on bonito as bait.

Rock and surf anglers had a pretty good week with salmon making up the majority of catches but there were some good copper bream, lantern bream, spade fish and big blacktail catches as well.

The salmon were caught mostly in the dark, reportedly preferring chokka and octopus baits.

There were no reports of pompano being caught locally but a number of good sized pompano came out in the upper South Coast area.

Popular rocky gullies seem to have been working pretty well where copper bream and lantern bream activity was evident.

Surf conditions allowed for prolonged angling from the rocks and by-catches included blacktail plus the odd spade fish which are not normally caught by rock and surf anglers.

In the La Mercy area some sizeable zebras plus one or two decent rockcod were caught in the deeper gullies. Baits used were prawn, chokka and some mixed sardine baits.

Local anglers are not talking too much about shad yet but catches down south are slowly increasing.

Shad caught weighed in the region of one kilo. so the small green shad still have to arrive on the South Coast.

Garrick normally arrive with the shad, and with water temperatures dropping slowly it should not be long before they arrive. Dusting off of fishing rods and tackle would now be in order.

Other notable catches down south were big blacktail and plenty of lantern bream or cave bass.

There seems to be plenty of lantern bream around this year found along the entire coastline, so perhaps this winter will see a phenomenal run.

The Durban north beaches are beginning to produce a few fish with salmon and grunter on the bite in the Glenashley area. Blue lagoon produced salmon and a few shad.

This week’s long range weather report is favourable and it certainly seems as if we have arrived at that period of the year when the local coastline receives it’s best weather of the year.

The report is of light northerly winds with a moderate southerly wind on Wednesday, then back to light northerlies again.

A bit of wet weather is forecast for the weekend.

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