Diamonds are a guy's best friend...

or, at least, these diamonds are. This is my first Diamond Ray, which I caught on Sunday 22nd just before 5pm.

I had arranged to meet some of the guys from the Cape Town Fishing website at Hangklip, on the other side of False Bay from where we are, on Sunday to catch the incoming tide and maybe a geelbek (salmonid fish) or two which are supposed to be running riot out there at the moment.

I got out there a little later than expected as there were some things to do around the house and I only left just after 11h30. I thought I had enough time, but it turned out to be a 100km drive! I checked the spots indicated on my Google Earth printout but there were no shore anglers to be seen so I turned around and made my way back toward Gordons Bay. If need be I would even fish from the harbour wall, just so long as I could wet my line.


I fished at a spot called Platbankies 1, pictured above, which is anything but "plat" (flat). It is, in fact, a 200m hike down a cliff face (and up again later). It is difficult to get a good cast out and ended up in me landing on my arse getting my thigh and arm scraped and bruised when I tried too hard to get some distance. It's a nice deep-water area so there really was no need to try and get extra distance so it was all my own fault anyway. However, I was lucky, as I could have fallen into the very same gulley I would land the Diamond Ray in a little later, and would probably have broken something, such as my neck.

I had been trying a few different types of bait in the couple of hours I had been there, getting hooks stripped on every throw. It wasn't until I threw a mackerel fillet and I foul-hooked a strepie (karanteen) around 4pm that I confirmed what nibbler was chewing my baits off. I had hooked the strepie right at the point where you would insert a slide hook so I immediately changed to a slide knowing it would only be a matter of time before the strepie got taken either alive or dead. And I wasn't disappointed. In just over 1hr, as there was nowhere for me to put my "pension pipe" into the ground, I was sitting on a rock holding the rod straight out in front of me (like straight-sticking) and I felt the tension pick up followed by a few clicks of the drag and I knew it was a flatfish and not a bronzie shark.

I struck the fish hard and about ten minutes later, after dragging the ray into a gulley, I had to land, photo, unhook and release it all on my own as there was no-one else around. It measured 112cm in diameter (tables show 12.7kg).



What a beeaatch to land...but a pleasure in seeing it swim off...

I threw out another couple of small mackerel fillets, but each time got stripped, until about 18h30 when the wind very suddenly picked up to gale force and it became very unpleasant. After another hour or so of bracing myself every time I saw the wind come across the water, I decided I'd had enough and packed up my gear for the hike uphill.

Here you can see the wind whipping the water off the top of the incoming swell. The swell was moving left to right, but the wind was in the opposite direction.

Sitting in the car, panting, I SMS'd SWMSBO that I was on my way and the force of the wind made it feel as though the bakkie was going to be flung over the cliff. Every time the wind gusted through, it felt like the front of the car was lifting up and in a bakkie the size of that, you know how hard the wind was blowing. It was quite scary and I got the hell out of Dodge before something bad happened and you would not have got to read this story...