Tag: the sardine run

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Offshore Africa Port St John’s wins Service Excellence Award for Eastern Cape

Offshore Africa Port St John’s have just won Service Excellence of the Year for Eastern Cape in the 2016 Holiday & Tour Specialist Awards!

Offshore Africa in action down in beautiful Port St Johns
Offshore Africa in action down in beautiful Port St Johns

The following excerpt was taken from the announcement by Luxury Travel guide.

 

“Congratulations Rob & Debbie, you have won Service Excellence of the Year for Eastern Cape in the 2016 Holiday & Tour Specialist Awards!

 

The Luxury Travel Guide awards program selects winners based on their achievements and strengths in the travel industry. We received an overwhelming number of superb nominations this year and the judging panel had the unenviable task of selecting those firms, teams and individuals within each category most worthy of an award.

 

All winners of the 2016 Holiday & Tour Specialist Awards are subject to the same rigorous assessment criteria, carried out by our experienced in-house professionals as well as a number of celebrity guest judges. This ensures that only the most deserving teams, businesses and individuals walk away with one of these prestigious accolades.  Award winners that have demonstrated success and innovation will gain a place in our soon-to-be published award winners’ guide, which will be distributed to over 500,000 readers.

 

All of Luxury Travel Guide Award programs represent the pinnacle of achievement, championing the best in their respective fields, therefore to come out as a clear winner is an achievement to be proud of.”

Click on over to Offshore Africa in Port St. Johns, right here.

smaller logo Luxury Travel guide

 

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Waterfall Bluff by Offshore Africa

Waterfall Bluff by Offshore Africa

Offshore Africa in Port St. Johns in the Transkei took to the skies to bring us this radical view of Waterfall Bluff, a few clicks north of their base in Port St. Johns.

Offshoreportstjohns.com have been operating on the Transkei Wild Coast for many seasons now. They offer many different adventures from river cruises on the Umzimvubu to ocean safaris and scuba diving.

But their biggest and most sought after adventure is undoubtedly The Sardine Run!

Each season Rob Nettleton and partner Debbie Smith take to the water and get right involved with the chaos that accompanies the sardines wherever they go. Dolphins, whales, seabirds, fish and of course… sharks.

Every shark with a smartphone knows about the annual breakaway of approximately a tenth of the southern oceans sardine population. This crazy shoal of adventuring sardines just leave the pack and head north into South African waters and get hammered on the way, literally to depletion.

Humans are also in on the action as limited netting is allowed.

But the real action is underwater as baitball after baitball form in a desperate attempt to escape being eastern by something. The birds start from the top, and the predator fish from the bottom until there is literally not one sardine from that baitball family left.

Rob invariably has his camera rolling and captured the spectacle exceptionally well. Working with Rob and Debbie to get the video of your lifetime is a pleasure. Together they have ample experience and are committed to service excellence, attention to detail, and safety.

Check it all out at offshoreportstjohns.com

 

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Great White killed at Sunwich Port

Great White Shark Tracking Project
Great White Tracking Project
Great White Tracking Project

In a wierd twist within the Osearch Shark Tracking story we started to follow last week, one of the tagged Great White Sharks was caught and killed by the Natal Sharks Board at none other than our favourite surfing beach – Sunwich Port, down here on the south coast of Kwazulu Natal!
The beautiful fish weighed 300 odd kilograms and was taken to the NSB headquarters in Umhlanga for analysis and whatever else they do to the carcasses there.
The shark took a drum line bait and must have died a horrible and gruesome death…much like a snared wild animal poached in a game reserve.
The Natal Sharks Board have systematically decimated the local shark population of Zambezi, Tiger and other sharks here on the KZN south coast and unfortunately, pelagic sharks like Great Whites also fall prey to their killing methods.
Drum lines are a move towards lessening their indiscriminate impact on the environment…but gill nets are still deployed up and down the beautiful Kwazulu Natal South Coast. These gill nets have been killing dolphins, turtles, rays, sharks (lethal and non-lethal) and other forms of marine life like whales for the better part of half a century now.
A bureaucratic organization – funded by municipalities and the tax payer…the Natal Sharks Board and it’s staff and management can be credited with the most cruel ocean animal killings imaginable.
All to protect the tourist dollar as inland punters flock to the Kwazulu Natal coastline each school holiday.
The shark nets do not cordon off a beach from sharks at all – many, if not most sharks are caught on their way back out to sea…on the inside side of the nets. What the nets and drum lines do is reduce the local population of lethal sharks in an area…seriously unbalancing the ecology in that immediate area.
Twisting the story even further…another shark attack was recorded at Port St Johns, down the coast in the Transkei. Port St. Johns has the highest incidence of shark attacks in the world.
Solutions? Many solutions to the shark attack problem are available. Shark spotters are deployed in the clear waters of the Cape…sonar has been proposed to the NSB as a monitoring system in dirtier waters of KZN, but was ignored completely…
Observation and avoidance using technology would far outweigh simple killing and eradication.

Check out the Osearch project here…https://thesardine.co.za/?p=1153

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