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THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

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Phill Williams & Johan Burger with 212 pound Bronze Whaler on UK surf outfit<br />

One option tried was to put the rod over the shoulder and walk off into the desert trying to physically<br />

drag the fish in closer, then rushing back towards the beach cranking the reel to gain some line.<br />

And so it went with some anglers vanishing off up the beach, taut singing lines, and Johan dodging<br />

between incoming rollers trying not to get soaked as he guided yet another big shark to within gaffing<br />

range.<br />

I should add here that although all the fish were gaffed, this was in the flesh towards the tail, and after<br />

a quick measurement, photographs, and tagging, all were released, which itself was quite a task.<br />

On the final day, which was breathless and blisteringly hot, Johan decided to take us for a short run in<br />

the opposite direction to where we'd done most of our earlier fishing to a place known locally as Donkey<br />

Bay. So, with no gulley sharks in the area for bait, we stopped off at the nearby town of Walvis Bay to<br />

put a box of large frozen mackerel in the truck.<br />

Obviously, by this stage, we'd all pretty much mastered the casting, which to varying degree's we were<br />

by then already doing for ourselves.<br />

We'd also all had more big fish encounters than you could shake a stick at. So whatever happened in<br />

this the closing session, to a large extent didn't really matter. All the boxes had already been well and<br />

truly ticked, except unfortunately my two hundred pounder, for which I was eight pounds short. But<br />

what the hell. Time to relax and to play, or so we thought.<br />

Having heard of kob to forty pounds taken just up the way the day before, four of our party decided to<br />

finish off the trip trying for some of those, leaving six of us, plus Dave Lewis, to have one final go at<br />

the sharks. And like the others, with nothing to loose by that stage, I fancied going completely solo on<br />

the sharks using my own UK surf fishing gear, which even if it wasn't up to the job and ended up broken,<br />

didn't matter as we were about to go home anyway.<br />

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