Galjoen at Pearly Beach
On the spur of the moment my friend Gert and I decided to go fishing at Pearly Beach early Saturday morning. I picked him up at 6 o’clock and we were off. Is early in the mornings not just the best time of the day?
As we went through Stanford Gert suddenly remembered that he had left our bait at home, this was not a good start to the day at all, luckily I had put some old salted blood worms into my bait box so we were not totally without bait.
When we arrived at Pearly Beach just before 7 o’clock it was just starting to get light, we grabbed our tackle and headed off to the beach. We were not very impressed with the water at all, it had picked up over night and had a mean side wash that was going to make fishing even more difficult. The tide was high and we had driven all the way so we had to make the best of a bad situation.
Luckily for us the whole beach was covered with red bait pods, Gert decided to take a walk down the beach to cut some bait seeing he was the one that had forgotten to pack our bait. Actually it was his bait and there had been no talk of sharing bait, but he still felt bad so I let him do his thing.
The water had been very nice and flat in Hermanus the previous day so I had only brought lite tackle for galjoen, you very seldom need to cast to far to get fish in this area. Now I had the problem that my heaviest lead was a 5oz and I had only one left in my bag, needless to say it would have to do.
Gert was walking about 200 meters away when I sent my first cast in loaded with the salted bloodworm, was I glad I had remembered to bring it along, the stench that was coming from Gert’s direction was something else, it was much lighter now and I could see and smell that he was busy cutting gas heads(rotten red bait) the most foul smelling bait in the universe.
At least he had the grace to laugh at himself, this was really rotten bait very much liked by galjoen. We made a few casts off the beach but the side wash was too strong, so we decided to find somewhere else to fish. A quick stop at Pearly Beach Cafe to get a few bigger leads and off we were to Soetfontein.
The trip to Soetfontein was luckily a short one, the stench of the red bait in my Landrover was really overpowering and I could not wait to get it out of the car. We walked up and down the beach for a hour or so with no luck at all, the water was very cold and had no colour what so ever.
We decided to make a rock near the car our last stand for the day seeing that the tide was starting to come in quite strongly. The wash was as bad if not worse than when we started, possibly due to the incoming tide but we kept at it. By this time I had become quite desperate to get a pull that I was also using red bait but still no luck.
I started packing up when Gert had a pull and missed the fish, and was he impressed with himself. He had another pull that he missed and was about to pack up when down went his rod, fish on. He played it nicely to the rocks in front of his feet and quickly lifted it out, a very fat undersized steenbras of about 50cm, the hook just barely holding onto its lip. The fish was released to grow the extra 10cm and be caught another day, always a nice feeling letting the odd fish go, well done Gert.
Gert made one or two more casts then decided to join me at the car for a nice cold Windhoek, another fishing day coming to an end.