I have just returned from a magical trip to Wavecrest hotel in the Transkei, where I spent some time casting paddletails for kob in the surf and had some good success when conditions were right. I also learnt a bit, as I do every time I fish, and a few more pieces of the kob spinning puzzle fell into place.
Conditions weren’t on our side when we first arrived and for the first few days of our trip. The sea was cold, going down as far as 13 degrees. We were in a neap tide period, with little tidal change. The surf was also quite big, with plenty of surge inshore, making it very difficult to find fish and get lures in front of them.
This all changed as we started to come off neaps and approach the spring tides. A fairly strong South Westerly picked up one day at around lunch time. While the water was still icy cold, it immediately started to look better as the surf flattened.
I grabbed my gear and headed to the concrete block at the river mouth. The high tide meant that I had to wade through icy water to get onto the block, but once there I had the wind at my back and great looking patches of milky water in front of me.
It only took a few casts before my first bite came. I was retrieving my paddletail slowly, keeping it in the bottom layer of water, when I felt a gentle tap and as I lifted my rod, felt the first head shakes of a kob. I landed five that session, not big fish, all between two and four kilo’s. But it was some action and things were changing.
The fish felt like ice blocks in my hands. They had adjusted to the cold temperatures though, and were happy to feed in the icy conditions.
The following day I landed a couple of bigger kob from the block, but they were still shoal kob size. I decided that I would need to search around a bit if I was going to find a bigger fish.
By now the water had warmed up to around 19 degrees and I ended up walking a lot, fishing every fishy bit of water that I could find. I had met up with the Lilford brothers at the hotel and they had given me some of their weedless paddletail rigs. These were fantastic and allowed me to fish in some spots, where throwing a jig head in would almost certainly result in a lost lure.
The confidence of fishing weedless allowed me to get paddletails into holes, and bring it through rocks and kelp that looked great. I ended up catching some better kob and also notching up a yellowbelly rock cod and a first for me; a black musselcracker on paddletail. While it wasn’t a huge fish, it is always exciting to add a new species to the lure-caught fish list.
The tackle that I used on this trip was a Berkley Venom Taipan 11 foot spinning rod. A Penn Slammer 4500, spooled with 30lb Berkley Black Velvet braid. I had a 1.5m leader of 50lb mono, connected to the braid with a PR knot. At the end of this I had a good quality clip,
which enabled me to change lures frequently, so that I could vary my weight or colours, depending on conditions. I used Mad Mullet Jig heads of 1oz to 2 oz, and rigged these with Berkley Powerbait Ripple Shad paddletails. When I needed to go weedless, I rigged these, or Berkley Grass Pigs onto the Aubrey Da Gama weedless rigs given to me by the Lilford’s.
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