MONTHS of painstaking monitoring from the shore and air paid dividends last Friday when a combined task team arrested 10 poachers, seized large quantities of gill nets and a number of poacher boats at Pongolapoort Dam.
Made up of the SAPS Water Wing (Richards Bay), the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and the Pongolapoort Dam Concerned Interest Group (JODCIG), the task team assembled at Golela to carry out the operation.
At least four illegal craft laying nets close to the western shore in the area of the EKZNW Pongola Nature Reserve on Thursday evening was the catalyst for the operation to mobilise.
Four boats were confiscated in the main dam.
All the boats were laden with gill nets and fish such as Red Breasted Bream, Mozambique Bream, Tiger Fish, Sharp Tooth Catfish and Silver Catfish.
At least 12 of the Tiger Fish were large hen fish between 3 and 6kg likely carrying eggs ready for the upcoming spawning season.
Two more boats with nets close by were found abandoned in the gorge and these were destroyed on Saturday.
Approximately 8km of nets were destroyed, the most ever seized in a single SAPS Water Wing operation.
Significantly, the arrested suspects said their catches were nowhere near what they used to be over the years – a sad indictment of the enormity of this environmental destruction which the authorities tasked with the custodial protection of this resource have chosen to ignore for the past two decades.
Read the full story in the ZO Weekender edition.
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