In February this year I had a trip planned to De Hoop in the Cape. I decided to add on three days and spend that time fishing the Breede river, which is just a stones throw away from De Hoop. I had heard so much about this amazing river, and was dead keen to see just what it was like for myself! My camera man, Brod Whitaker, and myself drove down from KZN, stopping for a night at Cape St Francis on our way. The drive the next day was awesome, it had been some years since I had done the Garden Route, and we both made the most of it, stopping along the way and admiring amazing scenery and some spectacularly fishy looking pieces of water.
We arrived at the Mudlark guest house, where we were to be staying, at about 4pm and were greeted by the sight of the river being blown to pieces by a very strong wind. There was not a single boat on the water, which wasn't surprising, as the water was streaked with white foam and looked very unfriendly. I sat and chatted to the owners Tim and Hilary and they seemed pretty confident that the wind would blow itself out sometime that night.
I set up my tackle on the veranda of my room and enjoyed a couple of beers, before we had a delicious dinner and an early night. We were up at dark thirty in the morning and the wind had indeed dropped. We quickly grabbed gear and headed upriver on foot, following the bank for a few hundred metres.
There we found a couple of rocky points, with a small shallow bay in between them. This looked like a good area to get started and I wasted no time in getting a drop shot out into the water. I was testing the new Shimano Terez Waxwing rod, which had just arrived in the country, and had it matched up to a Stella 5000 reel, with 20lb Sufix 832 braid on it. I was casting 3/4 oz jig heads, which I dressed with a six inch McCarthy paddletail in the baby elf colour. I quickly discovered that the rocky point that I was standing on ended in a ledge just beneath the water in front of me, making a nice deep channel. There were some rocks in the water close to the edge, which I lost a couple of jigs on, quickly learning that I needed to speed up my retrieve when my lure got close in. I didn't have any action on my drop shot, but the spot looked good and I was confident that it would produce fish at some stage.
The tide started to drop fast and I started working the shallow bay with some surface lures, looking for grunter. It looked like an ideal spot, with a muddy bottom and plenty of mud prawn holes. After a short while a boat arrived and dropped anchor at the mouth of the bay. It turned out to be Keith Tait, from the Fishing Specialist in Cape Town, along with Sean Rafferty. We chatted for a bit and they invited me to join them on the boat, as they were also looking for grunter on topwater lures. Keith hooked and landed a grunter on a pink Rapala X-Rap Walk:
It wasn't a huge fish, but it was a grunter and that is all that mattered! A short while later I landed one as well, also on a X-Rap Walk, and I was happy to be on the score board. I had been hearing that the Cape boys were not convinced that the Breede grunter would eat surface lures and was happy to see that they did.
Brod stuck a live mud prawn out on a light stick and let it drift weightless near the drop off to the bay and it was picked up by a feisty little grunter. As he brought it in, there was a massive swirl in the water and a big zambezi shark chased the grunter right into the shallows, so much so, that half of the shark's body was exposed and it was sliding on its belly! Brod managed to pull the grunter away from the shark, and the shark left the scene. Brod landed the grunter and we were interested to see that it had a tag in it.
We sent in the tag information to ORI when we got home and found that the grunter had been tagged at exactly the same spot the previus week by my friend Andrew Parsons.
By now the tide had started to turn, so we moved to the big sandbank closer to the river mouth to try for some garrick on the pushing tide. We cast small poppers and managed to get some small garrick, which were great fun on the light tackle that we were using for them. I was interested to see that the garrick were definitely a lot more interested in faster moving, splashy poppers than they were in any of the slower, more subtle surface lures. This isn't all that unusual, but their preferences definitely do vary a bit from place to place. The garrick action was fun, but the fish were on the small side.
As it got later and the tide pushed us off the bank we decided to go back to the rocky point where I had started that morning. I got my dropshot rig out and started working the lure, bouncing it off the bottom in the deeper channel. All of a sudden the lure got hit and the rod went down. I was into a good fish, which fought hard, using the current to its advantage and telling me it was a kob by the violent head shakes. I pressed it as hard as I could, being mindful of the shark that we had seen there that very morning, and not wanting this fish to get eaten. Whenit got close it made some massive swirls on the surface and I knew that I was into a decent kob. I was very pleased as this was one of the fish I wanted to catch in the Breede. I landed it as the sun was setting and was super chuffed with a good day's fishing!
The next couple of days brought us much of the same. We pretty much followed the same pattern, fishing each spot on its tide and had a lot of fun. I tried some 1/0 VMC Spot circle hooks for grunter with live mud prawn and no sinker, just casting the prawn with the wind behind me on a very light rig. This was lots of fun and we caught some nice grunter this way.
The Garrick were pretty small, but I understand that they do get some very good garrick in the river at times, so it was just our bad luck that the big ones were not around. The little ones came in shoals and provided great entertainment on the very light tackle we used for them.
The little one above that Brod is holding actually ate Keith's lure while he was targeting grunter, so it was one of the few garrick to show interest in a slow moving lure. The others wanted the lure to be ripping away from them before they would bite.
I got a couple more nice kob on the drop shot as well
The kob in the pic above also had a tag in it. When I got home I checked with ORI and it had been caught a year before at Struisbaai by a MR J Hamman, so it had been free for 362 days and had moved 102kms. It is really good to see that guys are tagging and releasing fish in that area! Hopefully the next guy that catches it will have as much fun as MR Hamman and I had with it and maybe he will release it for someone else to enjoy as well!
The three days went by so quickly, I felt like I was just starting to understand the system a bit and it was time to go. Anyhow, I was very impressed with the Breede as a lure fishing destination and it is definitely on my list of places to return to. There is some seriously good fishing potential there!
