We've had to cancel the previous two trips due to bad weather conditions, so when I spoke to Andrew and Wednesday afternoon and he informed me that they've had just on 300mm of rain and measured wind speeds of 102km/h on the beach I had some reservations about the trip, but the forecast was “looking good for Friday”. As John Tinley always says, “if you don't go, you won't know”. With that mindset, we decided to go ahead with the trip and with hindsight, that turned out to be a very good decision.
Friday was the last day of the Mynmanne fishing competition, and we decided to launch after the crowds. The weather was indeed very good with a light SW wind blowing when we launched at 07h30, turning to a light NE late afternoon, perfect conditions to run North for the day. On the way there we could see that the viz was not going to be fantastic with big swells that could cause groundswell on the shallower reefs.
Kobus was the first spearo in the water at Elusive and confirmed our suspicions for 5-7m viz. Rudi jumped in just after him and 30 seconds later he shot a tropical that swam up to the flasher - very promising.
Shortly after that I managed to put a spear in another tropical and Kobus bagged one on his next drift. We adjusted our line to compensate for the reverse current and on my first down I crossed paths with a cuta just off the bottom. A good start to the morning.
We decided to move to the next spot in the hope that we could find cleaner water. The viz at Secret was much better at 10m plus and on the first drop we were surrounded by a school of juvenile bluefin kingfish. The steady North - South current certainly lifted the spirits. There were good numbers of kingfish and tropical yellowtail on every drift that provided us with good action and some very entertaining and rather frustrating encounters with potato bass that claimed their share of fish and gear - Rudi is still grumpy. We soon had more than enough fish on the boat (all with holes in them Roger) and after getting something to eat and drink, started making our way back to 9mile in pursuit of cuta.
(Just a note of how unpredictable the sea can be, especially after a severe storm. We were running parallel to the beach about 250m behind the shore break when a swell of, no less than 6 m started forming to our left. The skipper immediately turned 90 degrees to face it head on and we cleared it just in time. Had we been travelling on the back line, as we often do, we could've been in a real trouble)
At 9 mile the viz was very poor and the current very unpredictable. We tried our regular spots with very little success and decided to call it a day to be back on the beach just after 15h00, leaving us enough time to clean gear and process the fish 11 fish for the day.
We had coffee and toasted sandwiches on the beach on Saturday morning to confirm, as predicted, that it would be irresponsible to launch in the stiff North Eastly that was gusting over 25 knots.
Thank you, Marinda, Kobus, Arno, Danie and Rudi for good company and a most enjoyable trip.
