Adam Reports In From The Backline – Winter Is Marching In #kzn #sardine #conditions
Adam Reports From The Backline- Winter Is Marching In: 14 degrees at the low end and a high of a paltry 19 degrees Celsius today! Luckily, we are up here in KZN at the moment, where we are still sub-tropical and we get the sun’s warm rays warming us through the chill of most days.
Winter
As with what normally happens after a big old cold front like that, it leaves absolute perfection in its wake. Surfers can hunt waves up and down the coast. Divers will be getting clean water courtesy of the SW, which brings the Agulhas Current right in close, where it can perform its cleaning duties wonderfully. And fishers can enjoy the still weather and calm seas. And the warmer water. The cold fronts warm the water as opposed to the warm fronts from the north that cause an ocean upwelling, and the water temperature drops inshore.
However, these chilly seas are sardine conditions. The fishies like the water at 19 degrees Celsius or so. So it is a combination of the cold fronts (low pressures) and the warm fronts (high pressures) plus the counter-current that work together to create the ideal water conditions for the sardines to make their way up along in the inside of the Agulhas all the way to Durban.
Plus, they need a decent winter south swell to help them along. And, observations that the sardines need a full moon to get moving have been proven plausible each year. Luckily, we have a full moon coming up, we are halfway to a good moon right now.
If all these things don’t synchronise and play nicely together, then the sardines stay way out deep at sea, where the public cannot see or get to them. This is falsely seen as a no-sardine run, but meanwhile, the sardines are just way too deep.
It is estimated that a mere sliver of the sardine population makes this crazy run up the coast. 10% is the number touted by the experts. For perspective, one of the big netting boats from out of Helena catches the equivalent of the entire sardine run in one night. Luckily, these big boats are not allowed past Port Elizabeth, and this is why Garry Hook in PE reckons that our sardine population is so healthy as opposed to the Mossel Bay shoal and the Cape shoal.
These populations do intermingle and socialise. Mainly around the Agulhas Banks. But their DNA shows clearly the three separate shoals. And there is another sardine way up north. He is the Grey Sardine and is also exactly in appearance as the southern populations. I have caught and eaten them in a very remote place 50 km south of Pemba, Cabo Delgado, Northern Mozambique. The locals were meshing them old style – on dhows and dugouts. There were so many baby marlin in attendance that one dugout fisherman caught 9 little blacks in one paddle!
These Grey Sardines have clearly adapted to the warm waters up that way and are even reported to be right up in the Gulf of Aden. And into the Red Sea. Maybe one day they might follow the couta right through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean!
I just wonder how long it’s gonna take for the Zambies to connect the dots and also make that crossing into the Med! I would have guessed that they would have been first?!
Sardines and Sightings
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