NEXT week sees the commencement of the Shelly Beach Mallards/Mercury Ski-boat Festival, taking place at Shelly Beach.
This is the largest ski-boat competition on the South Coast with the briefing taking place on Tuesday evening (July 1) at the Shelly Beach Ski-boat Club.
Fishing will be from Wednesday to Saturday.
Up for grabs is an amazing Mallards Cobra Cat 630 fitted with two 115 Mercury outboard motors for the biggest game fish caught.
This competition is open to jet ski and ski-boat anglers.
A reminder that the entire event will take place from and at the Shelly Beach Ski-boat Club, with the weigh-in starting at 2pm every day and closing at 5pm from Wednesday to Friday, and 4pm on the Saturday.
The prize-giving will take place at the Shelly Beach Ski-boat Club on Saturday at 7pm.
With some really good-sized couta, the biggest being 38kg, caught off Port Edward last weekend, and tuna of up to 38kg being caught off Durban, plus wahoo of over 30kg coming off Aliwal Shoal, the competition is going to be wide open.
So come along to the scales and witness some really good fish being weighed.
In other news, we have just returned from that magnificent spot, Mazeppa and once again it lived up to its reputation of being probably one of the best and most consistent producers of big sharks along our entire coastline.
While we did not catch as many sharks as previous trips we still had our fair share of raggies around the 150kg to 180kg mark, a Zambezi of around 120kg and a couple of bronze whalers around the 80kg mark.
We had two garrick at Boiling Pot, though the guys did have a lot of pickups with the garrick dropping the baits due to being too large.
A nice-sized kob was also landed on a stick-bait, which proves how versatile this bait actually is, having already accounted for tuna, bonito, skipjack and garrick.
We put to the test the newly developed ‘bait release clip’ with huge success and were able to send out baits of up to 10kg on the kite, some 300m behind backline within seconds, and release them with no complications of tangles.
We had huge success on these baits, hooking some really big sharks, which we unfortunately undertackled for.
We are hoping to demo this clip locally as soon as conditions allow.
At Mazeppa we had great expectations of seeing some sort of sardine activity, but unfortunately, bar a few scattered birds here and there, there was absolutely no sign of any activity.
Hopefully this is not going to be another year with no sards.
Darren Poole (Cracker King), fishing on his dad’s boat Dumizulu, has had some really good-sized musselcracker over the last week, with the largest weighing in at around 33kg.
Some nice-sized pink salmon have also been boated.
Shad have made a welcome appearance with most of the popular spots producing their fair share of fish. Garrick still seem to be elusive, though they should make an appearance soon as they seem to be in abundance off the Transkei Coast.
Tide Table
High Tide
June
27 03.36 16.00
28 04.09 16.33
29 04.41 17.04
30 05.12 17.36
July
01 05.43 18.07
02 06.14 18.41
03 06.48 19.17
Report by Mark Bennett (Tackle Box)
