 WEST SIDE STORY — The birth of deep sea angling in the Western Cape — by Dave Rorke
“TO do something, say something, see something before anybody else — these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.” So said Mark Twain.
Those fishermen of yesteryear, the pioneers of our sport, must be looking down on us from above with the broadest of smiles on their faces.
So ended “The Wonder Years”, a story of the birth of ski-boat angling in South Africa with the launching of the first ski-boat in 1945 by Hayden Grey, and the years that followed. The story of those early days ended with the formation of the Durban Ski-Boat Club in 1951.
The first ski-boat club in Durban — the Vetch’s Pier Ski-Boat Club — was formed in 1946 with only ten members, but soon afterwards the club’s launching rights were withdrawn because of pressure on Captain Jarvis, the port captain, allegedly from a commercial deep sea fishing company.
The ban affected all ski-boaters — not only club members — so believing in the power of numbers, they joined the Albatross Angling Club whose members were mainly rock-and-surf anglers. However, even from this position of strength Captain Jarvis refused to budge, so he was threatened with legal action which resulted in him relenting, albeit conditionally. One of the conditions was that the number of ski-boats operating from Vetch’s Beach would be restricted to 20, to which the Albatross Club agreed.
However, this condition wasn’t accepted for very long, and with added pressure on the port captain, it was eventually agreed to allow for more boats owners to become members. Numbers rapidly swelled to the point where the tail appeared to be wagging the dog in the Albatross Club, so finally they broke away and, in 1951, formed the Durban Ski-Boat Club.
As ski-boat angling gained in popularity throughout the country, clubs were being formed in the main centres. The East London Ski-Boat Club can trace its roots back to 1948/49 with six or seven boats putting to sea from the Orient Beach and the Nahoon River Mouth, but it wasn’t until 1952 that the club was formalised with launching from the old West Bank Beach. They put down a concrete slipway at the beginning of 1953, but in 1956 — because the South African Railways required West Bank Beach for development — the club moved to its present site on the east bank of the Buffalo River, just upriver from Latimer’s Landing.
By the time the Port Elizabeth Deep Sea Angling Club (PEDSAC) was formed in that city’s harbour in 1960, informal and more formal ski-boat “clubs” had popped up all around our coastline at most accessible launch sites, both surf and slip.
By the early ’seventies there were no less than 37 ski-boat clubs in South Africa and South West Africa, many of them inland, which eventually led to the formation of the South African Ski-Boat and Light Tackle Game Fishing Association (later shortened to the South African Ski-Boat Association — SASBA) in 1973.
Cape Town’s first ski-boat club was the Cape Boat and Ski-Boat Club at Rumbly Bay which was formed in 1967, followed a year later on the opposite side of False Bay by the Gordon’s Bay Boat Angling Club. CBSC’s clubhouse was opened in 1971, whilst GBBAC’s clubhouse opened its doors in 1974.
In ski-boat angling terms, the Western Cape was a late starter, excepting perhaps fishing aboard smaller motorised craft in False Bay and close inshore, southwards from Cape Hangklip to Walker Bay, and northwards from Cape Point to Saldanha Bay. They targeted mainly yellowtail, kob and geelbek, but more often than not found themselves looking for bottom-feeders — roman, hottentot, perhaps red stumpnose, and so on.
Read the full story in the January/February 2009 issue of S
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