Offshore Africa Port St. Johns is run by Rob Nettleton and Debbie Smith whose combined experience will ensure your sardine run experience will be unforgettable. The team still have a few slots open for the 2015 run, but the bookings are filling up fast – click here to get in touch and onto the list!
Steve’s Restaurant on the left at the end of town (next door to The Outspan Inn), is a great place to drink a coffee, catch up on FB (free wi-fi), and prepare for the 2km stroll up to the cape Hermes lighthouse. Leave you car at Steve’s where it will be safe and in a shady and convenient spot for when you return to a well-deserved refreshment.
Amble towards the point past the ancient police station and soak in the views. Just don’t go swimming anywhere along here. Stop at the information board and soak up some cool information on the area.
Meander inland a bit and on the left into the jungle goes a road flanked by two ancient pillars, which may have held a gate at some point in history. Snake (mmm…) your way up the road and break the law a tad by skirting the gate into Portnet property (they don’t mind, it’s for the tourists and they love it).
Up you go and the place unfolds before you. The ancient Cape St. Hermes comes into full view and you can hear the sounds of Port St. Johns in it’s heydeys of hedonism and hippi-ism. Who else may have wondered this track back then?
The lighthouse is steeped in history, made of hewn rock and downright beautiful. It stands sentinel over a group of lethal rock hazards and to the north, the entrance to Port St. Johns. There is security, a tap, and a lighthouse a keeper, who is glad to roll out some historical facts and stories about Cape St. Hermes.
Common Dolphins are major players on the sardine run stage as they strategise and deploy organised attacks on the millions of sardines making their way north each year. Sharks and birds try cause havoc with these maneuvers but the agility and brains of the dolphins always wins out as tonnes and tonnes of sardines are literally devoured.
Fortunately for divers, the sharks are completely mesmerised by the free lunch and getting in among the action is much safer than it seems.
Offshore Africa Port St. Johns and divingwithsharks.co.za offer packages that get you right in amongst the action. Launching out from Port St. Johns puts you right in the sardine shoals’ course as they migrate north closely followed by anything and everything that can swim or fly, humans included.
Up and down the coast preparations are being made and bookings filling up as the eternal flame of hope for a good sardine run burns bright in the souls of the millions of die-hard sardine freaks. The Sardine Run 2015 is almost upon us!
This imagery by Rob Nettleton reminds us exactly of why we yearn and yearn, year after year, beer after beer…for the sardines. The chaos of it all. The sharks. The dolphins. The birds. The whales. The fish. The action!
Contact Offshore Africa in Port St. Johns here…http://www.offshoreportstjohns.com/Â to reserve your place in the water for 2015.
The local dude on the rocks fishing for kob at Poenskop was stocking up on live pinkies. It was about 4pm and after casting plastics all day – only enticed a few shad to strike, destroying my 5 inch bullheads and forktails. It was an overcast day and even showered some and the water was off clear -so after all the propoganda about which colours to use when and where, decided to forego my luminous eighties style colours and thread on a real dark model from MacCarthy. I was also after a kob.
So I shouldered up to Thulani the local subsistence professional, with his pink and red estuary rod but over sized Penn coffee grinder fully loaded with heavy white nylon and now a livebait trace. It wasn’t 20 minutes and his rod tip started dancing about the sky and he was vas. Not a big fish, but from way out there where he had cast, it was quite a tussle. The fish seemed to congregate around a big bombie about 30 metres out. It was swirling with white water – the perfect ambush spot for kob.
Now I was amped. Earlier this day I had been contemplating on how many casts on average around here, in the ocean with plastics, it takes to hook one good fish. At this point a decent batting average is about 100 casts per good fish, with stragglers in between. But, that’s 100 well placed and timed casts…which means a heap of travelling and timing in between evenonly a dozen casts sometimes. But surely it was my time now as on this trip I had been throwing lures and casting a fly, and I was way into the hundreds by now.
Bang! A stray one of the small shoal sized kob came too close and a lucky cast landed the # 1 Mydo Luck Shot Mini with Blue/Black/Silver MacCarthy split tail right in front of it’s nose. The extra weight of the Mydo took the plastic down the back of the ledge and right into the kob’s mouth. The hook came out easy and Thulani was actually stoked when he saw me chuck it back, a way different reaction to the Mozambique subsistence crew!
They were not big fish but they could have been so it’s back to increasing that strike rate or casting a few more hundred times a day!
