The short rains seem to have started at the coast, and the fishing has improved, although the old adage ‘fishing is fun’ has to be stretched a bit when it rains all day out at sea! Pity the poor skipper who has to face the wind and rain as clients play their fish without having the option to retire to a dry saloon with hot coffee once the fish are boated!

In both Malindi and Watamu waters yellowfin tuna became more active on the rainy days, and a group of regular anglers from Germany out in the Kingfisher boats, have had good days with tuna, wahoo and kingfish, while the last two days the sailfish have also appeared with four of the five boats getting ‘sailies’ as well as good scores of smaller fish. Earlier both Clueless and Neptune found a sailfish, then Clueless motored down to Shimoni to try their luck on the seamount north of Pemba, where they caught two swordfish by night, and tagged a striped marlin as well as catching both yellowfin and bigeye tuna during the day.

Simba returned from a successful four day trip to Lamu, having tagged nine sailfish, and found plenty of yellowfin at Watamu on the rainy day, but chose then to livebait most of the day in the hope of raising marlin. Alleycat had raised a big black marlin in the canyon area a couple of days before, which refused the live bait and swam away, but it shows these fish are there, and keen anglers will work all day to target them. This latter boat also released a blacktip shark, while Tarka caught a whitetip shark of 64kgs, having landed a nice cobia of 20kgs the previous day.

B’s Nest tagged two sail earlier in the week,  and had some good catches of bottom fish along with Ol Jogi so let’s hope for lots more rain!