Courtesy of Dennis King

The Kosi Bay fly fishing report for this month is, sadly, very short indeed.

The lakes are very quiet and, on fly, there is very little chance of rustling up anything really good. There are still some fish around and bait fishing for species such as spotted grunter often picks up a bit but the game fish just do not seem very enthusiastic about taking flies. Fly anglers are even more scarce than fish and so there have been very few reports of anything being caught on fly ín the lakes in recent weeks.

In the ocean the shad have not yet arrived and it is mostly very quiet. The shad usually come right at the beginning of June, often on the first day of the month, and they are usually very consistent in their timing. They are, however, not consistent about hanging around and in the last few years they have been small, few and usually far between.

They have been present south of iSimangaliso for some time and there have been reports of excellent shad being caught in the Durban area. Even at St. Lucia and Cape Vidal shad have been around for several weeks and hopefully they are on their way.

In the meantime things have been pretty quiet although there are a few reports of good greenspot kingfish being caught and also some huge giant kingfish cruising past. Recently I saw two magnificent bluefin kingfish cruising past in the clear water, cast in front of them and hooked and landed a bluefin kingfish, of about 250 grams. The large fish definitely scared the smaller fish as they cruised past but it actually seemed to stimulate them to feed.

In many places there has been an enormous amount of sand offshore and very often this seems to have kept the decent sized fish away from the shoreline. Often the waves break at this sandbar beyond the rocks and the larger fish only seem to come inside the sand bar at very high tides.

This is, however, often a very beautiful time of year to go fishing in the Kosi Bay area. If you are lucky there can be completely calm days with enough swell to confuse some fish and fishing can be an extremely pleasant and even rewarding experience. It will not be long before the winds become stronger and more problematic and we will have many “grey days” when all colour seems to disappear.

I will not waffle on any longer but suffice to say that conditions at Kosi Bay could be very pleasant and the shad should be here soon. A very bad day fishing at Kosi is usually much better than a good day in many other places.

Tight lines,