Categories: Report

2022 Garrick at The Block report

Looking towards The Block and the Port SHepstone Lighthouse from under the bridge

2022 Garrick at The Block

2022 Garrick at The Block: It’s been a great year for the garrick hunters in Port Shepstone. But being a garrick hunter this year has meant spending hours facing off with huge east winds that try blow you right off the beach. Or torrential outbursts of rain and west winds.

A big thank you to Alan down in Shepstone who took the time to shoot and submit this fun little video.

The Good Days

In amongst these crazy days, are a few pearlers and this is when the fish can take some punishment.

Check this video out that we shot over a decade back…when the went mad too.

But it seems the crew have started moderating their catches as it’s becoming very clear that the population, which is isolated and vulnerable, is going down fast. Between the jiggers in Port St. Johns and the total loss of estuarine nursery habitat here in KZN, this little community of friendly garrick need all our consideration.

The Garrick comunity

Do not swim past Kosi Bay in the north. And do not make it around the Cape much further than the warm water in False Bay.

This isolated paradigm that the garrick find themselves in, is their weakness.

Tag and release

It was the efforts of Dr Rudi van der Elst and his team at the Oceanographic Research Institute that got most of us tagging. In the 80s. And these exact efforts have resulted in a high-level understanding of how our little garrick population lives and survives here in Southern Africa.

Other garrick populations

The Mediterranean definitely is the garrick’s ideal habitat. It is a giant estuary anyway (with a man-made leak out to the Indian Ocean on the East side – the Suez Canal).

The garrick get really big here.

Here in South Africa, we also get them rather big. And very hard to catch at those sizes. Once a garrick gets about 18 or 20kgs, it becomes a hell-fighter.