2000fish's Blog – Steve Wozniak's hunt for fish species

DATELINE: FEBRUARY 1, 2023 – VLEESBAI, SOUTH AFRICA   

My first trip to South Africa was in 2006. Even though I was only there for a few days, I caught a good load of species – 21 to be precise, taking me to a total of 582. We didn’t have the best weather, so for each fish I got, the guide would casually mention that we should also have gotten this, or that, or some other one. It was a nice trip, but the place seemed like it could be an absolute gold mine, and I knew I’d be back someday.

The return trip would have to wait almost 17 years, and of course, a lot happened in those 17 years. My cholesterol went up, for one. I met Dom Porcelli, for another. (Dom is one of the seven persons on earth who has caught more than 1000 species.) While meeting Dom wouldn’t go quite as high on my list as meeting Marta, for example, he is a fellow species angler who loves to do long trips to exotic locations – a man after my own heart. And we travel well together, as far as I know. As he was setting up a two-week extravaganza in South Africa, he was kind enough to invite me along, and so begins our tale.

This wasn’t even my first long flight of the year. My employer, a German monolith who shall go nameless, decided it was somehow a good idea to fly my department senior management to a small frozen town near Frankfurt for a few days of rambling discourse in which the word “Cloud” was spoken at least 9,317 times. (Interestingly, the German word “Kloud” means “We have no business strategy.”) At least I got to sneak out for a day and have a sausage and sauerkraut lunch courtesy of Jens Koller, the fabled zander angler and Sportex pro staff member. Still, 2023 would be the year I turned 60, and thoughts of retirement were creeping into my head with greater and greater frequency.

Steve. Jens, and a bunch of Sportex rods that will travel the world with me. Have a look at their travel stuff – it’s the most varied selection I’ve ever seen, and I do a fair bit of travel fishing.

The flight to Cape Town was uncomplicated – for me. San Francisco to Newark to Cape Town. Period. The idea was to arrive the evening of January 28, so our guide, Zander de Beer of Zoolook Sportfishing, could pick us up bright and early on the 29th and head a few hours east where we would base our fishing.

The Travel Gods made Dom’s life a bit more complicated. His original flight, which was Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta to Johannesburg to Cape Town, was cancelled on short notice, leaving Dom rescheduled to arrive two days late. There was no way he was going to miss two days of fishing. With utter calm, he rebooked a new flight from Miami through Qatar to Cape Town, which would arrive some 90 minutes before the guide was due to pick us up. Meanwhile, I got to the Hilton around 6pm, had a lovely dinner, and a long night of sleep. This proves there is no justice in the universe.

On final approach over what I believe is False Bay. If that’s false, then it would be Table Bay.

A relaxed Steve arrives in Cape Town.

My alarm was just going off just as an exhausted Dom stumbled into the lobby. He checked in, showered, and got maybe 45 minutes of sleep before our guide arrived. We would be spending the next five days with Zander, who is a noted specialist in shore-based big game fishing. Ben Cantrell had fished with Zander a couple of years ago and gotten into big sand tiger sharks and some monster rays from the beach. Dom and I came a bit earlier in the year, because that’s what our schedules allowed, but we were still hopeful we could get into a good mix of inshore variety and a few trophies. 

Zander impressed me the moment I met him. Very friendly but super-efficient, he had us all packed up and on the road before I could open my Red Bull. It’s about four hours to Vleesbai, and we had to make a couple of stops, for provisions and bait and tackle, so we wouldn’t be fishing until well into the afternoon. I thought this made me impatient, but Dom somehow had the energy to be even more overeager than I was. We were both searching drainage ditches by the 7-11 for stray fish.

The whole province is beautiful.

Grocery shopping with Xander was awesome. We bought four things – meat, potatoes, more meat, and Red Bull. There is so much Marta could learn here. We also stopped in a tackle store and got what turned out to be a critical item – white rubber-soled rock shoes. These kept me from falling to my death during the next few days, and for this, I was grateful.

The white shoes. Highly recommended, especially by Billy Johnson. (No one under 50 is going to get that one.)

We got to the house midafternoon – it was a beautiful vacation home, plenty of space and an amazing view, perhaps five minutes walking from the ocean.

Welcome to Vleesbai.

The view from the patio. I could get used to that.

Steve and Zander head to the water.

We unpacked frantically, put equipment together, and raced down to the rocks. Xander hefted most of the gear, in an enormous backback that must have weighed 80 pounds.

And yet he was the one sprinting ahead of us down to the water. I was fine with him going first because there are cobras.

 

Social media info for Zander, for those of you young enough to have social media.

We finally set up to fish around four. It was only then that we considered that it was actually really, really windy. Zander still set up a couple of big baits, casting out impressive distances with giant surf rods.

Zander casting into the wind and waves.

The forecast showed decreasing breeze each day, but this first evening was difficult for lighter stuff – whereas half an ounce would normally be fine, we found ourselves having to cast at least two ounces to get on the bottom. With my chronically limited attention span, I quickly started poking around the tidepools with small baits, and it was there I made the first score of the trip – a banded goby.

It wasn’t the 300 pound sand tiger I imagined, but I was on the board, and we had a lot of fishing ahead of us.

Turning my attention back to nearshore holes, I managed to get a white steenbras – giving me three of the four steenbras species. (The first being the west coast steenbras in Namibia and the second being the sand steenbras in Israel. The final one, the red steenbras, is a large, deep-water predator that takes a serious, targeted effort. I have dreamed of catching one since 2006, but we were unlikely to see one on this trip.) 

A small white steenbras. That’s my thrilled look.

Dom, not intending to be a jerk, got two species I did not – a striped galjoen and a stone bream, a close relative of the sea sweeps I have caught in Australia. To be fair, we was working harder than I was – he’s surprisingly nimble and was scrambling out onto rocks I wasn’t going to try.

Dom fearlessly works the bigger tidepools.

Dom’s striped galjoen, a gorgeous little fish. I never did get one, and don’t think that doesn’t bother me.

We pounded it until after dark. Zander was game to keep going, but Dom and I needed food and sleep. He is truly 24/7 with this when he is on the job. His business involves a lot of travel – he goes wherever the big fish are, but he has also a lovely wife and a fishing-crazy son at home. He was on the phone with them every chance he had, and his son’s fishing portfolio is extremely impressive.

Two species in half a day wasn’t bad, and we had four more days – one of them on a boat. 

We had to organize cooking around the daily scheduled power outages that affect most of the country, but between flashlights and a gas grill we had steak and potatoes on the table quickly.

This man knows how to stock a fridge.

We then went through the whole local species book with Zander and asked him what we could and couldn’t expect in these waters. Many fish were either boat-only or up in the tropics, but we still had dozens and dozens of targets. One that caught my attention in particular was a pajama shark, a small cat shark that was supposed to be common locally. I was fascinated with catching one because a Marta favorite Netflix film, “My Octopus Teacher,” portrayed the pajama shark as an octopus-murdering villain. Zander thought they would actually be something of a pest in the reefy shore areas, but I had no idea how hard this was going to be.

The morning started out very well. We began again with big baits off the rocks.

Gorgeous, to be sure, but casting out and landing fish in this stuff was a challenge.

It was still windy but trending downward, and after an hour or so, one of the rigs got absolutely crushed – rod folded over, line screaming off the reel. I grabbed it, realized the fish was big and fast, and idiotically asked if it could be a pajama shark. Zander shook his head sadly. 

It was then I learned exactly how skilled Zander has to be to catch these big fish from shore. The fish, naturally, changed angles and headed for structure. This required running and jumping along sharp, slippery rocks, which Zander did like a crazed mountain goat. I took my time and went carefully, which means I almost lost the fish a bunch of times. Zander was patient, and slowly, we guided the fish into a small cove. I had no idea what it could be – too big to be one of the small sharks, too fast to be a ray. When it finally surfaced, even Zander was surprised – “It’s a #$%^ing yellowtail!” he yelled. It was a yellowtail – by far the biggest one I had ever seen, pushing 40 pounds.

So while not a new species, it was a gamefish, and a spectacular personal best.

Without Zander’s incredible skill and athleticism, I would have been left with a broken line – the guy was now officially a superhero: The Cape Crusader. (I know puns are the lowest form of humor, but it was the best I could do. Deal with it.)

We then decided to head down the coast to try for some other species and, of course, the pajama shark. He packed up his 80-pound tackle backpack, and we were off.  We spent a fair bit of time that second day chasing a small shark and not catching it. My bad. Dom tacked on quite a few species, but most of my catch consisted of silver porgies and klipfish – hard-fighting and beautiful, but not new species.

The dreaded silver porgy. Vleesbai’s dominant pest. I caught over 100 of these on the trip.

A klipfish. They are all gorgeous, and they all look different, but they are usually plain old Clinus superciliosus.

As afternoon became evening, the tireless Zander was just getting into his groove. He suggested we go down onto Vleesbai beach and try for sharks and rays. He felt fairly confident we would get lesser sandsharks, which are a guitarfish with an open world record, so that had my attention. We took a pleasant late-summer walk down the beach. 

We set out a few big baits and waited. Fairly quickly, one of them went down hard, and Dom landed a beautiful common dogfish.

That’s about four times bigger than mine.

I was next up, and the second bite happened right away – sort of a shaking, rattling strike that Zander predicted was a guitarfish. It was, and even better, it was sufficiently large to qualify as a world record.

Now we’re talking.

Later in the afternoon, I also added the local eagle ray – quite a battle on surf tackle.

As with most rays, all you can do is hang on. And it wasn’t all that big.

This is what it looks like with a big fish.

A close relative to our beloved California bat ray.

So I was up four species and a record – not wide open yet, but it’s not like I could catch these anywhere else, and we had three days of improving weather ahead. 

Dom and Steve on the beach.

Zander volunteered to keep fishing all night, but even Dom, who goes harder and on a lot less sleep than I do, was done for the day – he had spent hours rock-scrambling while I stayed on the beach. I think that was the only night I had REI camping food for dinner, because the sausage looked a bit adventurous for me. 

The next morning, we started again with big baits off the rocks, targeting sharks. We both got smooth hammerheads – not monsters, but perfect to get the species and not spend all day fighting it.

This pulled plenty hard. I can’t imagine getting a 200 pounder on to the rocks – Zander has had to do some insane things to beach big fish, including wading/swimming out into the wash with the rod. The man is fearless.

This photo was taken by one of Zander’s friends a few years ago. If you look carefully, below the X, you can see a hand and a fishing rod out in the wave. And remember there was a big shark on the other end of the line. We are not worthy.

These things are one of the strangest designs in nature.

We then drove off to some rubbly, less steep coast to try for the bewilderingly absent pajama shark.

Our spot for the afternoon. Every pothole, ledge, and dropoff was loaded with fish.

While we didn’t manage to catch one again, we both got white musselkcrackers – one of the most sought-after shore-based gamefish – and a zebra seabream, which I had hooked and lost in 2006. It was nonstop light-tackle action.

I was proud of this, but these things get to 50 pounds.

Cousin Chuck will have no idea why it is called a zebra seabream.

The silver porgy continued, but at least they were decent-sized.

So that was three species for the day, and seven for the trip. The weather was laying down perfectly, and we looked forward to day four chasing big sharks and rays in the surf.

This is what we were hoping for – a sand tiger that weighed more than me. 

They also get some monster kob in the surf. I’ve gotten fish half this size in Namibia and was pretty proud of myself.

Sometimes, things just don’t break your way. We knew we were a bit early in the season, and our big targets just weren’t there. Zander gave it an enormous effort, but the big bites just didn’t come. We were treated to some incredible scenery, and late in the day, we decided to move spots and try for a pajama shark.

On the way, we stopped at a river and cast for leerfish – a species which I had also dropped off the hook in 2006. I also discovered the dassie, a soft of groundhog/flying squirrel/wolverine thing that lives in local brush.

Sure, they’re cute, but they bite. “Dassie” may be the only word that sounds sillier in English than Afrikaans – we call them “Hyrax,” which sounds like something from Dr. Seuss.

Once we arrived, there was plenty of scrambling through jagged rock, and I owe my safety to those white rubber boots. There were no sharks, but I managed to scrape up two species – the redeye sardine and the bluntnose klipfish.

You knew there would be a baitfish in there someplace.

Finally, a different klipfish. Dom randomly found these and pointed out the spot.

Disturbingly, Dom also caught a redfinger – another species I have never gotten. I was crushed. He tried to get me one for hours, but that was the only one we saw.

The place was insanely beautiful, but I wanted more fish, dammit. To be fair, I was catching a lot of stuff I had gotten in 2006, but I cannot be reasoned with on this topic.

This is a Red Roman, one of my favorite photos of the whole adventure. Zander took the picture.

The sun sets on my pajama shark chances.

That was nine for the trip, taking me to 2127 lifetime – not insane numbers, but steady production. Zander took us back to a beach to try for big sharks well into the night before we returned to more meat and potatoes. I could live there easily, and to be fair, if it was March/April, the big stuff would be all over the place. 

I slept fitfully that night, as I always do when there is a big trip the next day. The ocean had calmed, and we were heading out to sea for what hopefully would be a bonanza. The shore fishing had been hard work but worth it – but we would have one shot at a bunch more variety in the morning, and I wanted to get it right. Even in my brief dreams, I couldn’t have imagined how well it was going to turn out – and I have quite an imagination.

Steve