The last day of fishing proved yet again to be the decisive one in the 3rd Techniblock Billfish Challenge held in Kenya this week.
The North trade winds failed to appear, making a slow start to the fly fishing festival hosted by WildFly at Hemingways, yet every boat still managed to raise fish and register a score.
The baitfish, as always were around, signalled by the turns and gannets that were feeding off the scraps left from the bonito and tuna plundering the bait balls…..yet the billfish proved quite frustrating in the first two days.
As always there was much interest in the strip baits being trolled, with sailfish rising readily but being quite reluctant to be teased within casting distance.
But the tide eventually turned with even a Black Marlin taking one of the competitors, Shane Ferguson’s fly, which unfortunately didn’t stick.
The session competition proved yet again to keep all the teams in contention until the very last day with Johan Oosthuizen, Peter Wulfsohn and Cornelius Vermeulen registering two sailfish in the last afternoon to be crowed the 2011 Champions, with Cornelius also taking the coveted best fly angler award.
Francois Du Plessis also registered a 132lb Striped Marlin on conventional tackle and his team captain Andre Coetzer took down an impressive 77lb Sailfish to take top honors for the biggest Sailfish of the event on fly.
In total the 6 boats managed to tease up over 70 fish with about 30% being fired up to within casting distance and 8 sailfish being successfully tagged.
As usual in this adrenaline fueled form of fly fishing, in the heat of the moment many a cast went astray and 12 fish having taken the fly just didn’t make it to the tag and release stage. 6 anglers managed to record their very first sailfish on fly proving that any angler can target these magnificent fighter on fly.
This event has certainly imbedded itself in the fly fishing calendar with the 2012 Techniblock Billfish Challenge already set from the 29th November until the 7th December 2012.
As such, he is included not as a Guide in terms of the someone who can give you any indispensable tuition or direction, but to provide us with some fishing tales from the events that WildFly hosts and of course from the locations that the the WildFly team happen to be filming.
The real account from a social fisherman's perspective...
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