Miles of ocean and one Hot Spot
Offshore Fishing Report – Durban – 12-12-2017
We had a father, son and son in law from Hilton out with us on Fat Girl on an 8hr charter that ended up being 9hrs. We launched at 04h30 this morning and the same as yesterday we headed out in the rain, fortunately it cleared up before we even got out the port and for a while we even had some sun.
It was not a pleasant sea today with a strong S-N current, a NE swell and a SW wind making the water very lumpy. In the morning there was a very light SW wind but by 09h00 it started picking up and as the day went on it got stronger and was blowing about 25 knots by the time we got back to port at 13h30 making for a very bumpy ride home.
Inshore the water was cold and well under 23deg.C and so we headed out to deeper waters and eventually on the 200m Ballito side we found a warm patch of clear water with 24.5deg.C which was about 5km long in a sort of oval shape about 3km wide. So a rather strange patch of water that had a lot of activity and we got fish, at 08h00 we started up with a triple up of some smaller Yellowfin Tuna and so everyone had now caught a fish. Then we had 3 lines go away again and on one of them was a fish much larger than the others, unfortunately there was not enough glue on the hooks and all 3 fish came off. I carried on working the patch and it was not long and we had a line snap off the riggers and the reel was screaming and the young lad landed a nice little Bull Dorado. I continued working the patch and again one of the reels started screaming with seemed a good sized fish and again the fish came off, very annoying. I did another pass through the patch and a small Marlin came into the spread, snapped 2 lines off the riggers and hooked up on the 3rd one, but it was not to be. I was very frustrated as to have 3 on/offs in 1 trip is more than I can bear.
Eventually it was time to make the 40km journey back to port in a strong SW wind and against a strong S-N current which made the journey much longer taking an hour longer than usual, on the way home we managed to land another 2 Yellowfin Tuna bringing our tally for the day to 5 Yellowfin Tuna and 1 Dorado and everyone was very satisfied
