Most of the game fish action is still taking place up north at Cape Vidal, St Lucia, Mapelane and Sodwana Bay.

At Vidal anglers have caught a variety of game fish, including barracouta, snoek, dorado and wahoo.

Local offshore anglers returned to their launch sites with a couple of dorado and tuna among other species making up catches. Although garrick are still being caught, mainly in the Umgeni area, the numbers are declining as they head back south after the spawning season.

A few snoek are also being caught from time to time but anglers will be changing tactics as the summer game fish season gets under way.

Recently a few bonito added to catches. Last season bonito shoals were found almost everywhere in great numbers.

The bottom reefs continue to produce decent fish and recent catches included big yellowbelly rockcod, captain fine rockcosd, a few daga salmon, musselcracker, big soldiers and geelbek salmon.

Apparently there were patches of cold water in some areas but throughout the week the sea temperature was consistently hovering around 23 degrees.

Live bait is still quite plentiful in some areas as well, but sharks are now beginning to become a bit of a problem.

Inedible fish made up the majority of catches as grey sharks are becoming more numerous, while a few diamond rays were reeled in along the sandy beaches.

As the water warms, mullet, wave garrick or three spot pompano will begin to offer anglers using light tackle excellent sport.

Quite a number of big mullet have already been caught at venues along the South Coast but here too grey sharks are attacking most baits.

At nighttime small salmon plus the inevitable stumpies are providing the action but anglers had to be patient between bites as the fishing has been on the slow side.

My friends who target grunter along the Durban North stretch said they had caught a couple of fish but nothing to really boast about. They complained that peckers were destroying baits within seconds.

They also mentioned that grunter seem to be mostly on the small side but news they received was that up north anglers were doing well with some decent-sized catches.

Copper bream are becoming scarce in rocky gullies and finding them has become time consuming with some of the popular local copper bream angling spots producing nothing.

Those fishing the rocky areas at Salt Rock and Tinley Manor are still catching the odd rockcod but also reported that copper bream seem to becoming few and far between.

This week’s weather report should be a lot kinder to anglers with mainly light northerly and southerly winds forecast.

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