We've just hosted the annual Shelly Beach Interclub over the past weekend. The event is well attended by clubs from all over KZN and this year there were 12 teams competing. The competition is 10kg IGFA with the SADSAA scoring system, minimum weight for YFT is 6kg and other gamefish 3kg.
The weather forecast looked promising for Saturday (moderate NE winds and small swell) and Sunday looked threatening with a moderate to strong SW coming through around mid day (perfect tuna conditions!).
After an early launch on Saturday the boats all left backline and headed out to find fish. Most teams opted to start off with some jigging to try and get bonus species, others started trolling lures looking for tuna and bonnies. I was team captain for the Shelly Beach team and my teammates were Piet and PJ Jnr and our game plan consisted of jigging on several pinnacles and ledges around Protea to try and get a small kingfish, amberjack or tropical yellowtail and then move out to the tuna grounds to chase weight on the yellowfin. I get revved on my first drop on a chartreuse and white squid jig but the fish didn't stick
. The next hour resulted in two more hookups (one on whipping spoon and one on squid jig) but no fish. The showings were thick but the strong S-N current and low water temp gave the fish lockjaw...
We moved out of the Conservation Area (Red Zone) and headed south of the Southern Pinnacle pulling rapalas and feathers. As the NE picked up to 12 knots we got our first yellowfin on a pink/black/silver Halco a small fish around 5kg. We quickly got 3 more similar fish and then headed off to start our chumming drift. with a restricted bait allocation of 3x5kg boxes of sards and 5 hours of time left we had to be seriously disciplined with our chumming!
We settled onto a good drift and within 20 minutes we had a tuna of 7.6kg in the hatch. The same drift produced many more strikes (we paid a lot of tax!) over the next 2 hours and by lunchtime we had another Tuna of 16kg as well as 2 bonnies around 6kg each. We finished the afternoon with a triple strike of bomber YFT of which two were lost (one burnoff and the other taxed) and Piet managed to get his fish to the boat but it sadly got taxed right on the end of the tail by a monster Johnnie!
The fish weighed 18.6 kg but was disqualified due to mutilation. Piet was slightly upset as he had fought the fish extremely well on the TLD 25 with 10kg line and had done everything right only to be robbed at the last minute.......
We had a very wet ride back into the teeth of a 20knot NE with large swells. We weighed our 2 tuna of 7.6kg & 16kg and the bonnie of 4.2kg. This put us in 7th overall for the day - we needed that 18.6kg to have boosted our score. Other teams did well with a few big tuna, bonnies and the odd amberjack. The Durban guys scored a luck fishing off Bliksem IV they managed 3 YFT over 17kg, a bonnie and an 8kg AJ that doubled their points and put them way out front for the day.
Sunday dawned a pearler but the promise of the big SW had the teams planning for a short day. Our boat draw for day 2 was PJ Botha on Watt IV (the lucky boat that won the Shelly Bonanza this year so things looked promising
We stuck to our gameplan of early jigging but we got blown all over the place by the 15 knot SW and nothing wanted to eat our jigs. We made an early move to the drift and started chumming - the restriction on bait for the last day - only 2x5kg boxes! We found fish early starting with a 6kg YFT, then I got one of 12kg. Good start. The conditions stabilised by mid morning and aside from getting absolutely pestered by the flocks of birds eating our chum and chunk baits the YFT were around and some size specimens as well. We had a golden hour around 11am with lots of pulls from
!! I had an absolute screamer take off on my Tyrnos, it stripped around 300m on its first run before settling down and after 15min we gaffed a nice fish close to 17kg. By 12pm PJ Jnr had one of 15kg. We then paid tax properly. We lost 4 fish of around 15-18kg to a massive Zambo who had camped out under our boat!! Lines up was called and we headed home. We weighed 5 fish 16.8kg, 11.8kg, 15kg, 6kg and a bonnie of 4.6kg. Other teams battled on the last day and despite a few fish around 12-15kg nothing major was weighed. Consensus was that the taxman owned the day with many good fish being taxed during the fight.
In the end our second day's effort put us into 2nd overall and I was fortunate enough to get Top Angler for my 4 YFT
It was a great comp and nice to see some familiar faces again. The comp is nice for the North Coast boys who get to put away their couta gear and come press some proper YFT on short sticks with 10kg line!
Here are some pics.....
