SAILFISH SEASON - BAZARUTO ISLAND MOZAMBIQUE
Submitted by: Duarte
August 2009

For a number of personal reasons this year I only got to the Bazaruto Archipelago, for what is normally the peak of the Sailfish season, in mid April, three weeks later than usual. It actually turned out to be good timing as with water surface temperatures in the high's 26 degrees Celsius, a toad higher than normal, sailfish had not yet arrived in good numbers.

Instead, our first charter decided to do ultra light tackle drop shoot with a good diversity of species over the three days, culminating with a good +- 16kg GT on 12 pound line, that took an hour and twenty minutes to release late afternoon on our last day. We then had a few light tackle and fly fishing charters over the next week. We had a really nice one in particular with Steve Worswick and his two sons from Zimbabwe.

After unsuccessfully looking for sailies in the morning we decided to fly fish at the pinnacle at III trees and had great action, except that between releases we also lost a lot of good fish. First we had a number of unstoppable kingies bust us on the reef, then we started getting some nice kawakawa but the cuda kept chopping them up, after which we hooked into the cuda but the sharks appeared on the scene and just made a meal of it.

Besides the fishing the day had numerous highlights with sightings of a manta ray, helping a whale shark that was stuck at the end of the northern sand spit, seeing a rare leopard shark in two meters of water on the way back and shortly after a dugong on the surface.