#FishEagle: Sardines shift up a gear
On Sunday morning the first net of the season brought ashore about 500 crates of sardines at Port Edward. More were netted at Margate beach.
Poor weather at the beginning of last week resulted in impossible fishing conditions.
As the week progressed, the sea conditions began to moderate but a big swell moved up the coast, and on Saturday morning was close to five metres and waves running at three metres.
There was no news on the sardines during the week because of the rough seas but on Friday morning birds were seen diving off Port Edward, heralding the arrival of a shoal of sardines that afternoon.
On Saturday more shoals arrived but netters were prevented from netting the fish for fear of losing a net in the rough surf and strong currents.
Just before 9am on Sunday morning, the first net of the season brought ashore about 500 crates of sardines. More were netted at Margate beach on Sunday morning.
The forecast is for mainly light winds, so there should be more netting along the South Coast and the price of the fish should drop as more sardines are beached.
It looks as if this year’s sardine run will be a good one.
As expected, there was very little shore angling news last week because of the weather and adverse sea conditions keeping anglers off the beaches.
Before the onset of the stormy weather, some really nice-sized shad were caught – a bit unusual but much welcomed.
Not all the local fishing spots produced shad but the Tongaat River mouth is one of those venues that almost always produce good catches. As expected, the crowds arrived almost immediately once the word got out and I think more shad will be caught at first light as sea conditions improve.
Garrick also came on the bite, mostly at Tongaat River mouth and Blue Lagoon in Durban.
The colder water will favour garrick activity but live bait has proved to have been difficult to find recently. These days new artificial lures work really well though, so more garrick should be landed this week.
Night anglers scored some salmon or kob plus a few big stumpies, and these fish should still be around in the surf when the conditions moderate this week.
The salmon have been around for some time now and as we are in the winter season, the fish should begin feeding along all the recognised beaches.
Offshore anglers have also been catching some decent salmon. Stumpies love the rough surf conditions so there should be some good catches this week.
The rocky gullies should come to life again and the guys will be targeting copper and lantern bream plus big blacktail that normally arrive during the winter.
The rough seas would have scoured out the gullies and there should be deep water where recently there was mostly sand.
Rough seas limited offshore surf launches and only the larger charter craft were able to put to sea from sheltered launch sites.
Reports of quality bottom fish being caught came in. Big soldiers and rockcod were reported and apparently geelbek salmon can be found in numbers out deep at present.
With the water temperature now around 19 degrees, the winter species should become more numerous on the inshore reefs and these species includes daga salmon , half kob, lantern bream , plus the red fish species.
Anglers will soon be finding pockets of sardines moving north where they are fishing and at times this can prove to be a hassle as the sardines tend to take the reef fish with them as they move up the coast.
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