Thank you for the warm welcome. I am quite sure there are other members who know more about the sardine run than me, but I am more than willing to share my knowledge. If there is something specific you want to know, then feel free to ask. Until then I will share some general knowledge I have.
I grew up in Port Shepstone and still have lots of friends down there who checks out the scene for me and they let me know when and if anything is happening. There's also the Sardine hotline that I'm sure you guys must know about already. They update it whenever there is any new news and then there is also the Kingfisher angling report line that gets updated every morning. It's mainly for Durban but also gives some info on the South coast.
When we lived there the sardines came onto the beach all by themselves quite often and I can still remember the year that they came out so much that they had to get buldozers to get rid of the rotting fish from the beaches. Nobody wanted any more and at the Wild Coast Sun they were lying 1m deep on the beach. This is when the Sardine run actually happened in July. It gradually became earlier in the year and more often than not they could only be netted and didn't wash onto shore by themselves and more often they were considered no shows completely.
The fishing is normally very good the two weeks before the big shoals arrive and again two weeks after they left. During the actual run the fishing tapers off a bit simply because of the sheer abbundance of food, but when you do hook up it's generally quite big fish. Before the run all the predators are gathering and lying in wait for the shoals and afterwards they are still waiting for a few stragglers that might come their way.
The sharks, birds and dolphins can take out some of the smaller shoals totally while they are on their way from the Cape and almost clean out some of the bigger ones as well. The big shoals are km's long and that is what causes the spectacle. You literally see the sea come alive with millions of small silver fish and then the thousands of birds diving, and the whales, sharks and dolphins on the outsides.
Some people go nuts and I have seen men in business suits rush into the sea on more than one occasion. You will also see some people driving from one beach to the next following the shoals. They get this crazed look in their eyes. It's great fun!
At my previous job they knew that I could come in one day and be gone for three weeks the next. Unfortunately my new job is not as flexible, so now I must just hope that the sards behave. I am leaving early on Wednesday for my annual trip.
Normally I will wait until I get the reports that the fish are gathering on the Wild Coat and when I hear they are at Coffee or Mazeppa bay, I jump in my car to go to the coast. Then I normally have a little more than a week of fabulous fishing and the rest is spent looking at the spectacle. When I fish for Shad, I use whole sards, but I cut off the tail fin completely. It almost ensures a hook up every single time and the small fish tend to leave the bait alone.
Let me know if there's anything else you want to know.