BILLFISH
Targeting Richards Bay marlin on thin line
By Dale Leenstra Photos by Claudia Blignaut LTHOUGH it’s not often touted as such, Richards Bay offers some of the best marlin fishing South Africa has to offer. Our peak season runs from November through to March, but we generally catch fish from September through to June when the conditions are good. We are very fortunate to have such a long season as it gives us the opportunity to fish for them in different ways which keeps things interesting. I love to change things up and try new things all the time to try and improve my style of fishing, and use light tackle to target line class records. The first time I headed out into the deep with four 30 lb outfits, it opened up a whole different dimension to fishing, and with it came a whole new set of challenges. Despite the challenges, I can assure you that it improves your fishing as a whole, from your tackle preparation all the way through to how you fight the fish. At the start of every season my dad and I sit down and talk about what we would like to achieve in the coming
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months. There is a lot to consider as there is a big difference between targeting high numbers of fish and trying to catch line class records. Deciding in advance what you want to achieve gives you a very good idea of what to prepare and how to approach your days on the water. We like to mix it up and try to do a bit of both; this means having all our gear ready to go as well as changing our game plan in the blink of an eye. I have two ways of going about it — the first is pulling hooked lures which is probably what everybody does, and the second is switch baiting. When we started targeting records we decided the first line classes we would have a crack at were 10- and 15kg line because we could quite likely achieve a number of records with a very wide variety of species.We mainly target blue marlin, but at times we have good numbers of striped marlin and the occasional black, so there’s always a very good chance of hooking some species, but probably the biggest positive of using those light lines is that you also get opportunities at gamefish like dorado, wahoo and yellowfin tuna. The gamefish you find out in the
deep might not be as abundant as on the shallower reefs, but they often make up for it in size, and every now and then you get a shot at one that allows you to set the bar a bit higher than you would’ve been able to inshore. I run a maximum of three or four lures at once, trying to put as little as possible in the water while trolling as this reduces the number of things that can go wrong. I am also very hesitant about running teasers, as the lures we use on the lighter lines are normally a lot smaller than our average spread. At one stage I was pulling a very aggressive XXL lure tied off on the corner, but I found the fish sometimes got hung up on it and if we didn’t retrieve it in time they lost interest in the smaller lures running behind it. By taking it out of the water, you make sure that whatever comes up behind the boat has to eat what you have on offer. Unfortunately this has a down side to it too. Off our coastline we don’t get many chances at fish weighing 600 lb and up, so when they come around you want to give yourself the best odds of catching them. Although it is possible to land them on thin line, this very often results in extremely long fights that normally
