At 4am on Sunday I was up and ready for the first epic Baha Boys deep sea fishing trip. Nick and I hooked up the Jet Ski and headed for Umdloti, stopped at a garage of course for a quick coffee and kak (you can’t go at sea).
At 5:30am we pushed the ski into the surf, and Nick pulled off a dodgy launch. There was a decent shore break, so the plan was we push the ski into the water, Nick jumps on and starts it, then I jump on and we go. That’s pretty much how it went down, except that as soon as Nick jumped on, a huge formed in front of him, and he put full steam to punch through it, not knowing if I was on the back. Seeing this happen, I took a good grip on the ski and pretty much did some barefoot skiing over the wave. Nick turned around looking a bit worried, and then laughed as he saw my white knuckle grip on the ski.
We tacked up behind back line and then started off with some trawling. After limited success we stopped over some structure to try and pick up some bait. We had no luck with this either so we went back to trolling. At around 7am we spotted some birds over the water, and when we got there the water was boiling as tuna nailed baitfish on the surface. We trolled through it a few times with no luck, and then tried chucking some drop shot at them. Nick had one knock but we picked up nothing. Eventually it died down and we continued trolling.
When we’ve gone fairly far north we turned around and started trolling back to where we started. FAIL! We were using a two stroke ski, and it was producing a large cloud of fumes. Since we were now heading in the same direction as the wind, the fumes started to build up around us. I was facing backwards watching my rod and chatting to Nick. Suddenly he stopped responding and I smelt a strange odor in the air. BWAHAAAA! Chunda! So there’s a new chunda boy in town.
When we got back to Umdloti we’d still picked up nothing. There was a bit of excitement however as some dolphins started following us on the ski. They were next to us, under us and all around us. In fact, they were so close I could’ve reached out and touched them.
We trawled for a few more hours while the swell got bigger and the wind stronger. Eventually we decided to call it a day and beached at around 10:30am. A few of the other skis had beached, and I’m glad to say that everyone blanked – hey, it’s better than just us blanking.
We loaded up the ski, gave it a wash, and then dropped it off with Nick’s boss.
It was a great first deep sea outing, and I look forward to the next one. A big thank you to Racetech Yahama for loaning us the ski.