Easter has come and gone, and the calm weather continues but few trips were made recently and it looks as if the fishing season is at an end. There is no official season for fishing, but the end of April is taken as the date for statistical purposes, and usually the weather deteriorates into very rough seas with strong winds, and most boats are taken out of the water for overhaul and painting, while skippers and crews have their well earned holiday!
At Watamu Alleycat has made a few trips, tagging a sailfish last Saturday and finding smaller fish such as kingfish, wahoo, tuna and dorado. The latter, locally called felusi, are plentiful in April and very good eating, American anglers would know them as ‘dolphin fish’ although they are in no way related to dolphin mammals! The previous week, the same boat released a nice black marlin estimated at 140kgs, perhaps the last of the season?
From Hemingways B’s Nest had a good bag of eight dorado, a yellowfin and a barracuda with anglers Mark and Phil Walls, and a day later White Bear also found eight dorado. Jasiri did a trip with Ali Al Harazi and Yasin, boating thirteen dorado and a wahoo, these boats are all fishing on the Banks now as further out, in the Rips, the billfish will have moved away with the steady blowing of the South East wind, the ‘kusi’.
This will be the last of these fishing articles for this season as there will be little news now till late July or August. It has been a poor fishing season, perhaps the worst for many years, with limited runs of both sailfish and marlin, exacerbated by the boats doing few trips due to the ongoing difficulties in the tourism scene
Simba would seem to be the top scorer on marlin this season, with about twenty five, with Alleycat and Tarka a couple behind, while Neptune must be the top gun with sailfish. So let us hope for better things next season as only a few years ago boats had a hundred marlin.
It is interesting to note that skipper Pete Darnborough in Alleycat had entirely black and blue marlin this season, and did not even see a striped marlin. In past years it was the stripes that predominated, while blues were rare. Why?