MEMORIES
Sunshine Days off Struisbaai
Fishing memories that make you smile By Jack Walsh
C
APE Agulhas, the southernmost point of the African continent, is often noted as being the Point that splits the Indian and Atlantic oceans. However, as currents are wont to do, they meander a bit between Cape Point and Cape Agulhas. A large variety of fish frequent the waters off the southwestern coastline of our country and the coastal waters east of Cape Agulhas where the temperature seldom drops below 18°C. On the land, there has always been a very small village around and above the Agulhas lighthouse, with the larger holiday village of Struisbaai, with its line of fish factories, cold stores, and a very small harbour, several kilometres to the northeast. After retiring from being a fishing skipper out of Walvis Bay, and returning to the Cape in 1972, I acquired an 18ft Hartley Vixen ski-boat named Pisces.With Ray Scott and Keith Crookes as crew, 1973 found us fishing in the annual Western Cape ski-boat club competition held there. Apart from regular catches of kob, Cape salmon and all the main species of reds, Cape Point is well known for its prolific yellowtail in the summer.They regularly congregate on a reef structure of note that’s known as the “Five Mile Bank.” Today, the venue has also become known as a light tackle gamefishing hotspot out in the deep for marlin, tuna and other species, although the weather does not always play its part! We arrived there on the Friday evening, prepared the boat that we had towed down from Cape Town, and enjoyed a welcoming braai. The next morning before sunrise we carefully slid the boat off the trailer into the very shallow harbour. It was dead still with not even a land breeze; the water resembled a dam rather than the sea. The eastern horizon’s light clouds were softly etched in pink, whilst a three-quarter moon was still bright and high in the west. Pleased to have been the first to launch, we set off for the bank, approximately 30 minutes away. We all knew that for the past few weeks, weather permit-
ting, the yellowtail catches had been very good, with large shoals of sardines keeping them in the area.We also knew that the local commercials had been catching them at night under the moonlight, so we were confident that the early morning hours would find the smaller fish feeding voraciously before the sun came up. About ten minutes shy of the bank, when we could see several commercials about a mile ahead of us, we were suddenly surrounded by a huge shoal of sardines breaking the surface of the sea. Our rods were ready with spinners, for that was the way you normally found the shoals, and, although it was still quite dark, as our spinners hit the water we were vas. We drifted in the shoal of sardines for over half an hour, landing medium-sized ’tail as fast as we could get them alongside, until a commercial on anchor lay immediately in our path. As we could now see shoals of sardine all over the place, we backtracked a few hundred metres into the middle of another shoal and I decided we should try anchoring. At first we were able to cast into the shoal and we continued catching them on the spinners, but when they were out of reach and our hook-up rate declined, Keith decided to replace the spinner with a hook and sinker to try for success in deeper water. He was immediately successful, although the first fish he hooked was very much larger than the others and took him a lot longer to land on his light tackle. Ray and I soon followed suit and we continued catching larger specimens with regularity. Suddenly we had a new problem —there were so many small fish under the boat that they were stripping our bait before we could get through to the large yellowtail below, so we changed to very much larger sinkers. By now the sun was well up and our fish hold was virtually full. There had been no time for each angler to mark their fish, but that mattered not as the main prize was for the total boat landings.
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