We left for Happy Wanderers early Thursday morning,I was armed with my custom built Purglas 350/7 and Shimano TN40 hoping to catch my first decent shark or ray.We arrived 11:00 and was greeted by perfect sea with a light NE wind.
We quickly unpacked and started baiting up with my wife mumbling something about we just got here,I looked at her and then at the water and quickly made up my mind,it was time to fish.i’m sure she’ll understand…I hoped.
We started with some sardine baits but the peckers were in attack formation and they cleaned the baits within seconds.Next up I tried some chokka with the same result and so it went on.I slid out a whole bonnie round about 5 o clock,while trying to catch some live bait.
My brother asked me to help him bait up his rod and I rigged up a mackerel head with some fillet wrapped around it on his torium 50 and shimano exage 1468..An hour later his reel went screeming of at a speed of knots,he picked up the rod and was on with a solid fish.
I quickly reeled in my two lines two stand by to assist him seeing that he had never landed or hooked a big fish like that before,at least I have some’’ big fish internet angling experience’’.
The fish took about 300m of line with crazy headshakes in between before I told my brother to tighten the drag a bit more and to try to turn it as it was heading for the rocks.The fish turned and took no more line for the next hour but swam up and down and parallel to the shore,then it got p.ssed of and took some line again.now at this stage I was crying like I was laughing because my brother was crying like a little girl because he could not feel his fingers anymore and he was sweating like a sumo wrestler who just ran a whole mile after a big mac mcmeal.This continued for the next 2 hours with my brother winning some line back and then the fish taking the line back again,this was an epic battle of tug a war.My brother started getting the upper hand and started walking up the beach and reeling in line as he walked down again…the fish was now only a 100m out,80,70,50,30m out I told my brother to be careful because this is where a lot of fish are lost,20m and 10m and as I moved closer to the water I saw a dark shadow and screamed to my boet to move left as the fish was moving right and then the dreadful snap…the line parted and the fish was lost.
Now what can we learn out of this?
What could this have been?
I think I was more beaten up by what happened than my brother and we decided that we would try again early the next morning.well that was big mistake number 2,the next morning the cold front hit the coast again and the fish went of the byte.I tried with no luck the following baits on Friday and Saturday,live wave Garrick,live karanteen,live blacktail,whole octopus,bonnie throw baits,mackerel and bay squid.
I have now started to work out my game plan for December when I’m off to Mossel bay for 10 days.
I truly hope that I will get some decent fish then.