Party poopers.

On Friday 6^th July at 5:30am, At, Gert, Pierre and I launched “Avanti” out of Richards Bay. There had been a number of snoek caught the previous day and the conditions looked identical, so we were hoping to get into some action.

We arrived as it started getting light, so I wasted no time in putting out a few small lures. When the sun was well above the horizon, we had our first pull. It was a snoek of about 6kg that Pierre caught… not a bad start. The lines were just out again when Gert had a strike and caught a similar sized fish. At turned back on the line where we had the pulls and unsurprisingly, we got another fish. This one was about 8kg. There seemed to be some bait balls on the sounder, so we worked the area and picked up single and double strikes. By 8am we had 6 fish, but it was as if someone had flipped a switch and they went off the bite. None of the boats were getting pulls so we assumed that was a wrap for the day. I tacked around a bit looking for the bait and birds, but there was nothing so I worked a shallow ledge that I knew and fluked another smaller snoek. After a few turns without any more action, I headed out a bit deeper to where I thought I had seen a splash. There were 2 terns fluttering about but when I got near them, they vanished. I made a lazy turn in the area and two rods went away. One fish was a nice one while the other was only about 4kg.

A good morning haul of snoek

I had just put the lines out again when we spotted the two birds again. They were dipping over a dark patch in the water. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the fish had pushed a baitball to the surface. We stopped near by and threw lures into the shoal. We all had chases, but nothing committed. The trolling lines were in the way, so we brought them in allowing us to manoeuvre more efficiently. At positioned us upwind of the shoal and we threw lures at it. The fish were quite aggressive and chased the lures on almost every cast. At one stage we were all three on with nice fish. This went on for a while before the first boat spotted us. As always happens, they started spoiling the fun by casting over our lines and just getting in the way. The sight of 2 boats right next to each other caught the attention of other boats who arrived on the scene. What really got to me was when one idiot, who loves the sound of his own voice, tried to tell us that we should move because the baitball kept swimming under our boat! This coming from anglers who can’t find their own fish and must rely on us to find them before they even had a chance at hooking anything! I had a few choice words for him…

With so much boat traffic on a baitball that was only about a meter wide, the fish became skittish, so we decided to pack up and head home. We had caught our fish for the day and knew there was a lot of work to be done cleaning fish. We were back in the harbour at 11am with a tally of 24 fish. There were 11 fish between 7 and 9kg with the rest being shoal fish of around 5kg.