Winter has finally arrived with the first cold front passing through at the weekend.

These cold fronts will be with us for a while. The sea temperature is still hovering around 21 to 22 degrees and needs to drop a couple of degrees in the next couple of weeks to ensure a good sardine run.

The strong winds along the Eastern Cape coastline have created rough seas and this may just begin to chase the sardines north.

During the week a large shoal of sardines, attended to by thousands of birds, was reported just north of Mazeppa Bay.

Pilot shoals had been seen earlier. It is still early days though before sardines will arrive in KZN waters but they tend to suddenly pop up where least expected. A good run is expected this year.

The winter fishing season seems to have begun with shad making an appearance at several locations attracting the usual crowds.

The Tongaat River mouth is again proving to be a good shad angling spot but other historical shad areas are not yet producing.

Areas closer to Durban reporting good shad catches were at the wreck at La Lucia and Virginia beaches. Blue Lagoon was another location that produced some shad but a big crowd makes fishing difficult.

Surprisingly, shad seem to be a bit scarce along the upper South Coast beaches, which normally fire first.

Top of the anglers’ lists at the moment are garrick which seem to have arrived in fair numbers and the Tongaat River mouth is producing garrick as in the past. The mouth always an excellent sot, as is Blue Lagoon in Durban where a number of garrick have been caught this past week.

Live bait is a bit scarce but fortunately spoon looks to be working just fine. Garrick seem to be plentiful as well along the upper South Coast. It will be interesting to see if this year’s run will be as good as last year’s fantastic season.

Anglers preferring the rocky gullies managed a few fish but I believe there has not been any fireworks and some popular areas are dead.

A few small copper bream, lantern bream and stone bream were landed but not much else among the rocks.

Once the water temperature drops as bit, the rocky gullies will liven up and anglers are hoping for the copper bream to be plentiful again.

After a couple of excellent copper bream seasons, the fish may not be quite as numerous this year. Time will tell but there will always be the regular species caught among the rocks.

Offshore anglers are finding barracouta a bit scarce but the big over 20kg fish will still remain in local waters until around July.

The surf launch skippers had big surf conditions to negotiate last week and gamefish fishing was a bit slow. The guys found a few snoek, the odd couta plus a few garrick feeding in the Tongaat River mouth area.

Most skippers opted to fish the bottom reefs where the fishing was said to be productive, with daga salmon, half kob and shoal salmon taking bait. There were also big soldiers and various rockcod species keeping the anglers busy.

There was a bit of a swell at times but anglers were able to spend considerable time at sea because of light winds. It was only at the weekend when the southerly winds began pushing through that fishing times became limited.

Sharks are still somewhat of a problem and one skipper and crew had a scary incident when a great white shark became interested in the fish they were catching off Tinley Manor.

This week’s long range weather report is not all that great, which is typical for this time of the year.

The annual period of calm weather is now over and the weather reports from now onwards will have to be scrutinised carefully before planning a launch.

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