Kob at Poenskop
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!
