THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Setting up the rubby dubby slick
Bait was a sandwich of gully shark liver wrapped in blood
rich gills bound together with elasticated thread. The fixed
hook at the end of the trace was then inserted into the
resulting sausage rather like threading on a lugworm, with
the free sliding second hook nicked into the other side
facing out the opposite way.
Then, with a skill that had even the shore specialists in the
party standing back in amazement, it was sent out by Johan
to the back of the breakers. And before the last of the baits
made it into the water, the first one had been already been
picked up by a shark, so it was game on, quickly followed
by two other sharks which were hooked a short time later
making it a triple header, and all within the first hour.
Shortly after, John Devine hooked up what would turn out
be the biggest fish of the trip. With John still struggling,
after a couple of pulls and several good hard strikes, line
started pouring from my reel too, and after a gruelling hour
long tussle, I had a 192 pounder on the beach. The other lads
had also landed their fish by this stage. John meanwhile was
still struggling, and a further hour or so later was still into
the same fish.
By this time people were starting to rally around offering
him encouragement. But unlike the fish, John was tiring fast. Then, two and quarter hours after hooking
up, he handed the rod to me. At first I refused. Only when he said he'd cut the line then did I relent.
I really started laying into the fish. After all, if we parted company, it wasn't really my fish anyway. So
beach or break, I had nothing to lose, except for seeing what it was that that could pull so hard, which
when finally it was beaten, turned out to be a monster of almost three hundred pounds, and like John, I
too had literally had enough.
Day one produced seven sharks, all over the one hundred pound mark. Day two was a little more
productive with ten fish, reverting back to seven again on day three, with day four a lot less productive
in terms of the sharks, as much of time was spent fishing for edible species such as Steenbras and Kob.
We only managed two sharks that day, both over one hundred and sixty pounds. So on the fifth day we
decided to concentrate solely on the sharks at a new location to the south of Swakopmund, known
locally as Donkey Bay.
This unfortunately meant no opportunity to catch gully sharks, so bait would have to be frozen mackerel.
No carcasses either to stake out along the waters edge to draw the bigger sharks in, which in light of
what was to happen was perhaps as well.
The response to the mackerel baits was instantaneous. Reels were pouring out line on all sides. It was
however to be a day of mixed blessings. Our final total for the day was our best yet, but that was only
half of the story. So effective was the mackerel, and so numerous were the sharks that it was drawing
in from seemingly miles around, that we had a feeding frenzy on our hands.
The problem this brought was that with so many sharks cruising the shallows with their mouths open,
they were repeatedly swimming into our lines, sometimes while we were playing a fish, and accidentally
biting the monofilament reel lines through.
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