Finally I have found the time to tell the story about the trip down South to Shelly fishing the “Sard run”, we did get down to St Mike’s for the 15 the 20 June. Oh boy what a trip!!!!

We arrived on the Wednesday and spent the Thursday getting ready and doing domestic things to keep the family happy and watched the birds flying South. When we woke up on Friday the birds were active just out side of St Mike’s bay and started getting ready to launch. The sea conditions looked reasonable although there was “brown water” for about 150 meters out. As we were about to launch a local friend said before we go out we should go and see what was happening at Orange Rocks. It was an absolutely amazing site the water was bubbling with sharks they were going crazy about 100 meters out in a relatively small area. There were fins and tails everywhere.

We decided to going out anyway (first mistake), and would bypass this activity. My son, Dean, had a good launch and I came off a few times and after drifting north gave up trying to fight the current and started again at the “rip” next to the pool. After swimming in. (Yeah, I know it was stupid now, brown water, no shark nets, etc etc. frankly I did not even give it a thought. Plus I had cut my leg so I had blood running down it). But I was determined, anyway I did get out eventually and baited up (second mistake, should have put a Halco or a Rapala on), tried trawling where the birds were diving without any luck.

We then decided to head south to Uvongo, yes passed Orange Rocks! No sooner had we started, WHAM 4x4 LOW RANG!, after about 15 min got busted, I was using fairly light tackle. And off we went again, about 15-min later same thing but this time Dean got busted. (We later established that it was sharks).

We got to Uvongo and turned around and shortly after that in the blue water. There was an almighty splash behind us, we kind of looked at each other and said “what the F%^& was that”. The splash was so big that by the time we turned around to look “the water was still flowing into the hole left in the sea.” By this time we were about 10 meters apart and Dean was slightly in front of me, I happened to look to him and behind him following about 3 meters, was the biggest shark I have ever seen in my life. I have subsequently identified it as a Bronze Whaler (or pretty sure it was) the same size as his Fishing Ski or dam close. !!!!!! I said, “I think we need bigger ski’s”. This guy followed us a little while and then headed east. A short while later to the east of us, seaward side, what appeared to be the same kind of shark jumped out of the water, but it cleared the water completely, so high we could see the horizon underneath it. We later caught (hooked) 3 more sharks and got busted twice and released one, (released? Yeah ok, cut the line loos). Dean remarked during one of the encounters that, “we should have brought the water ski’s with”.

We beached without incident and then started thinking about the day’s events. Were we ever in any danger? Not sure! Were we stupid to have gone out? Probably. Would we do it again? No way! Would we have missed the opportunity? Hell no! To have experienced that, was absolutely amazing.

By the way we later (on Sunday) met up with the Fishing Ski Adventure guys at Scotties, calling the “breaks” for the guys going out and detected a certain amount of bias depending on the type of Ski going out : -) only joking.

From the investigation on the Internet, the big shark could have been a Dusky or a huge Bronzy. I put my money on the Bronzy because of the colour but the information I researched says they normally don’t get bigger than 3 to 3.5 M. So I am open to correction on that.

Tommy