Told you so

Well I did not expect to be eating my words so fast. An hour or so after writing yesterdays report, my mate Rory MMS's me a pic with him and too many Snoek to hold up!

The following sms's:

10min ago at Toti, we all got ten each, biggest about 9kg (no scale). Seething with fish

When I woke up feeling grim, something inside of me said you are missing out yesterday. Knowing the Sards are around and the fact that there was huge swell (now here!) it was one of the window opportunities I saw slipping through my fingers.

Rory sent a mail just to whip me into a frenzy and no where to go:

The resolution on today’s catch was not good enough to send, will get the beach shots downloaded later and forward them if they look OK. To whet your appetite you will find a shot of my kids posing, the 9kg fish is the one in the immediate foreground. The darts the kids are holding were shot first before I realized how many snoek there were around.

Water was epic, clean and warm with small pockets of more or less stationery sards getting hammered by walls of snoek. In a very short time we had maxed out the daily bag limit with fish up to 9kg with the average around 6kg. You could get very selective. With the conditions being so good we jumped in again for a bit of fish spotting and saw a few other species (some high speed tuna coming in from deep and a big iggie mauling the inside wall while my buddy also saw two garrick idling by). As we had switched from hunt to observation mode we now sat watching the snoek barreling in and nailing the shoal –can’t say the trigger finger didn’t get itchy especially watching nice 6-7kg fish floating past within a metre (or less) of you. After each attack there would be uneaten casualties left lying on the bottom with the snoek clearly slashing up way more sards than they could eat. Two things stood out (1) There were no sharks despite 1000’s of dead sardines and all the fish shot (we weren’t the only speoro’s clubbing it) (2) the sardine shoal hardly moved all day even after the wind started cranking.

Now that we are all frothing at the mouth, let me tell you about what the sea is up to for the next few days!

In the words of Spike "UNPRECEDENTED WEEK OF BIG SURF AHEAD"

Gee I guess thats the diving out of the question, and well I looked at the surf in Ballito and the banks are not doing the swell justice. Durban will probably pump ........ but who likes to surf the crowds?

I guess this is a good week to get some work done!

Coatesman