It has been a quiet week with few fishing trips reported, not unusual in this period leading up to the holiday season. The weather has been nice, with a little rain and calm days.

The Malindi boats have been concentrating on looking for sailfish in waters north from Malindi, but these have been hard to find, although catches of yellowfin, wahoo and dorado are normal. Snowgoose found a sailfish on three successive days, while it was then Neptune’s turn on Tuesday to find the sail. But as peak season approaches it is to be hoped that more of these fish will move into the area.

Alleycat has spent a week fishing from Funzi , and the first day they had a striped marlin and a sailfish on but the hooks pulled. Next trip they released a sailfish caught on the way home while on a third day, they were successful with both a sailfish and a black marlin caught, while another marlin was missed. The Pemba Channel is an area where the change to the north wind really, turns the marlin on so this is something to look forward to.

At Kilifi, Iron Barde found a black marlin, while at Watamu, Tarka released a tiger shark, but not many trips have been made in these areas.

The Christmas holidays see many fishing tournaments taking place, and there will be a lot of small private boats entering. The Capt Andy’s Xmas competition takes place on 28^th/29^th December at Watamu and always attracts a good entry, with the catch value being divided by the length of the boat, which gives the small boats a distinct advantage. There is controversy whether traditional trolling methods only should be allowed, or whether anglers should be allowed to use more specialized techniques such as deep jigging and bottom fishing from stationary boats. However, these techniques are not normally used catching sailfish and marlin, and as these are usually around over Christmas, with their heavy points weighting advantage the problem might resolve itself.