Tag and Release shows the way with sharks.(Kenya)
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ill photo fishbooking.com |
Conservation is the name of the game in the world these days, and when we have seen the huge herds of game animals that roamed the plains of Africa almost wiped out in the past century, one realises that something similar is now
occurring in our oceans.
David Slater/fishingkenya.com
Modern technology enables commercial fishing fleets to detect enormous shoals of fish under the surface in even the remotest corners of the oceans, and with purse seine nets, long lines and wall-of-death drift nets to catch and wipe out the entire shoal!
So it is a welcome and refreshing change over recent years to see sport fishermen catching and releasing fish alive, and the tagging programme now provides valuable information to scientists and fishery stock managers as well as ensuring that these fish continue to breed.
A change, then, when the story of an hour and a half long battle with a big bull shark on Ol Jogi came over the radio, that the spectators saw only four keen young men who had been out in the boat lining up on the Hemingways gantry waving their tag cards to show that this monster, estimated at between 250 - 270 kgs ( 550 - 600 lbs), was released, to carry on breeding, as these big fish are usually females.
And plaudits to John Prior, who battled the fish to the boat, and friends Alex Stanford-Tuck, Oliver Belasis and Nick Mason, taking a week off from work in the City of London, for foregoing the normal trophy of a dead animal hanging up. But when the whole struggle is preserved on video as this was, who needs any other trophy?
Capt Peter Darnborough on AlleyCat also released a tiger shark about the same size, and the day before he caught fifteen yellowfin totalling 200kgs, so on some days the fishing is lively on the Watamu Banks, but the norm has been for very cold green water, and few fish striking. Peter Ready, on Seahorse, spent the whole day on the Banks without catching a single fish, not even one bait, and was very relieved to boat an 18 kg kingfish near the Leopard Reef, as he sailed home to Malindi! Apparently the sailfish are still shoaling outside this reef, but not coming up to baits, so we have to wait for them to turn on.
What is causing this cold green water is a bit of a mystery, as there does not seem to have been heavy rain further south, nor is there a cyclone in the southern Indian ocean. But strange upwellings do occur, and the colour could be a bloom of greenish algae in that cold water. But whatever the cause, the fish generally do not like those conditions, so we can only hope for warm water and tropical blue seas to come along!
At Shimoni, Peter Ruysenaars is taking two boats on safari down to Kilwa, where they were so successful with catches of big tuna last year, so we hope for progress reports soon from there.
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