A schoolie striped bass (above) and a chunky blacktail (right) couldn’t resist some action with Spongebob.
T
he SpongeBob slider was born on the banks of the Breede River. My entire obsession with dusky kob* however, came from another Overberg system, that of the Gouritz River. Some of my earliest fishing memories are from summers spent along the banks of the Gouritz and the few outings that I was privileged enough to join the men fishing for kob at night. It was on these waters that I heard the distinct “boof!” when kob suck mullet off the surface by means of gill chamber expansion. “Hoor hoe wei die kabeljoue?!” (“Can you hear the kob grazing?!”) my dad said when we heard this sound. Today on kob trips we sit around our braais at night like blabbering halfwits rolling the distinct kob sound around in our
mouths. It’s “boof!” meets “gnoof” (with a soft click on the first consonant) with a glottal hint of a superhero “kapow!” Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m still infatuated with kob, more specifically to “crack the code” of catching them on fly. I read every piece of fly fishing literature dealing with dusky kob. Literally. What I found was the sinking line and heavy fly school of thought. Big white schlappen streamer. Black and red kob whistler. Nah, I was not convinced. The results were as impressive as a slap drol**; more miss than hit. I decided to look further afield. The spin fishermen of the Eastern Cape
caught my eye. Guys like Chris Schoultz managed incredible catches of dusky kob on a variety of lures. One lure stood out above all else: the humble bucktail jig. As the name suggests, its up and down jigging motion was what made it so successful. I gave myself the challenge to come up with a fly that had a similar movement. But instead of something that lifts up when you strip it and sinks when you pause, I thought of doing it in reverse. That meant putting a reversed popper head on a streamer and fishing it with an intermediate or sinking line. Strip it and it dives, pause it and it floats upward. Hello SpongeBob.
“I PUT A REVERSED POPPER HEAD ON A STREAMER AND FISHED IT WITH A SINKING LINE. STRIP IT AND IT DIVES, PAUSE IT AND IT FLOATS UPWARD. HELLO SPONGEBOB.” 66
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