Greenfish Blog — fishing stories

Green fish with a story  It’s 11pm and I’m climbing into bed after doing the tackle prep, readying the lines and lures and ensuring the boat is ready.  I set my alarm for 2am for the days fishing.  I’ve done this a thousand times yet I cannot fall asleep as the excitement of the day ahead mounts in my head - the endless possibilities of tomorrow and the hope of a great catch.  A fisherman is the ultimate optimist; tomorrow will always be a better day with a bigger catch, so we keep pushing day after day, chasing that feeling...

This past Sunday I went to sea off Hout bay in search of tuna, the weather in the morning was incredibly unpleasant, cold and bumpy. I had a videographer on board to capture some of our day so we can share and show our story to our customers, how we fish and the impacts we have with our style of harvest so that the consumers are best informed to make their choices.   Tuna are amazing predators, perfectly designed to cut through the water at high speeds, with big eyes to visually hunt down prey such as sardine, garfish, squids and...

Due to its geographic location, Cape Town lends itself perfectly to world class tuna fishing. The warm Mozambican current that runs down the east coast, overlapping with the cold Benguela current that moves down the west coast, brings with it an abundance of nutrients and baitfish. This upwelling, along with the hake long lining and trawling, congregated contours and depths are all contributing factors to why tuna congregate here. The typical season tuna starts in October and is brought on after a good strong blow by the south-easterly wind which drives the warm currents closer to shore. The first half...

Plastic in our Oceans – and what each of us can do. Recently I caught a dorado off Cape Point. These fish are not common around Cape Town and only visit us when the waters are very hot or when a piece of debris drifts down, like in this case a tree, that carried many fish underneath it in its own little eco system. Dorado are famous for being the “chicken of the sea”, so I prepared this one to take home for dinner. While filleting the dorado, I felt something unusual in the stomach. It is very common practice...

In a world where information, true and false, is at our fingertips, and where we make decisions based on the information plated in front of us, it’s very easy to get caught up in a moment and be lead down an emotional rollercoaster that the producer of a film is laying in front of you. The latest Netflix documentary Seaspiracy regarding the ocean that is getting lots of media attention, although being heavily one sided, does a great job of creating awareness that we do need to do something towards our ocean’s health for it to be able to sustain itself...