Daytime Daga

On Saturday 13^th July at 7:30am, Wayne, Lorenzo, Julio and I launched “Galavant” out of Richards Bay. We were hoping to catch some bait for the upcoming sailfish trip.

Lorenzo's 1st daga (18.1kg)

Our first stop was on the pipeline. I sounded around and found a few nice showings but unfortunately, they were mostly small maasbanker and pinkies. We kept looking and eventually found some really nice marks. Wayne and the two boys sent jigs down and came up with a mix of shad and big maasbanker. I was not too interested in the shad, but the maasies looked great. We made a few drifts through the shoal when something big ate one of the baits off the hooks. This peaked my interest so while the bait brigade was filling the live well, I rigged up a trapstick with a bottom trace and pinned one of the maasise that was in the live well. Unfortunately, there was no action but the showing had also moved a bit. We sounded around a bit more and found another great showing. There were a lot of shad following the jigs to the surface so I changed up the bait and rigged a live shad. On the next drift, I had a pull on the shad and hooked up to a fish that took quite a bit of line. Lorenzo took the rod and about 10 minutes into the fight, he was wishing that he hadn’t. The fish gave him a good go but eventually, it tired and Lorenzo could get it up to the surface. We were all guessing what it could be, but finally the big silver shine gave it away and a lovely 18kg daga popped up. It was Lorenzo’s first daga and he was over the moon.

After a few photos, we continued catching bait. When we had enough, we headed back to the club for a beer. Not bad for a morning’s bait fishing.