On Saturday 13th 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.
