At 6am on Sunday 6th May, my Dad, Divan, David and I launched “Selfish” off Richards Bay. After a quick stop at the pipe, we had a few livies and headed out to the ships. On arrival, we found large showings of bait and were rewarded with several strings of nice mackerel and redeyes. After filling the bait well, it was off to small highpoint. The SE wind made the trip a bit uncomfortable as our heading was straight into the teeth but eventually we arrived. There were no other boats so I slowly idled onto the pinnacle and found a big showing. At the same time, small yellowfins and big kawa-kawa started jumping around the boat. Divan freelined a livebait while my Dad threw a spoon into the shoal. Both were rewarded with fish on in short succession. Unfortunately both fish parted ways with us. While this was going on, David rigged up his fly rod and made a few casts. I wanted to have some fun and tied on a small spoon and removed the hook. On the first throw, I had several small tuna clearing the water behind the lure trying to grab it. This went on for a while with a few fish holding so tight that they started taking line ... what a sight! The boat had drifted off the pinnacle, so I slowly headed back. As we stopped on top of the pinnacle, David managed to get a frigate tuna which went into the bait box.
This was followed by a kawa-kawa of about 3kg which gave him a bit of a workout. After about half an hour, the surface action slowed so we put on a few rapalas and pulled through the showing above pinnacle. As we passed through the showing, all the reels took off. This time they were yellowfins and 2 were bled and put on ice while the others were released. We could have caught tuna all morning, but dragged ourselves away to target a big cuda, so off to Petingo wreck we went.
The conditions were perfect again. Beautiful water, good temperature and little traffic, but with all this, we battled to get a strike. Finally after about 3 hours, there was a big splash behind the boat and the surface rod smoked off. Divan took the rod as the rest of us cleared the deck. I followed the fish off the wreck to what we hoped was shark free zone. After a few anxious minutes, Divs presented the fish and my Dad gaffed a 20kg cuda... Great stuff! The lines went out again but other than a half hearted strike on a livebait, the day ended without another fish.
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