During the prolonged drought a number of good sized kob and leervis were caught, tagged and released closed West Kleinemonde Estuary (just north of Port Alfred). Surprisingly, none of the tagged kob were recaptured but several of the leervis were recaptured, some even more than once. Most noteworthy was a fish caught by Dalton Phillips and tagged by David Drennan.

It all started on 6 November 2010 when Dalton caught 4 beautiful leervis ranging from 760mm to 810mm (fork length). Just more than a month later, during the December school holidays two young keen anglers from Port Elizabeth (Reece van der Merwe & Brody van Goeverden) recaptured two of Daltons tagged leervis; one was recaptured on 9 December and the other on 10 December. Both fish were released again into the closed estuary.

Good rains during the month of May brought much needed drought relief to the Eastern Cape coastal belt and also caused the mouth of all the closed estuaries to breach. This provided the first opportunity in more than two years for the big fish to get back to sea, where they spawn. The mouth breaching of the West Kleinemonde was particularly spectacular as the very full estuary drained its entire basin within six or seven hours. Millions of liters of water and millions of tons of sand went gushing into the sea, taking with it most, if not all, the big fish that were trapped in the estuary.

It was just a matter of time until one of the tagged fish would show up again. The first of which was one of Dalton’s fish that the youngsters also recaptured. This fish was recaptured by Andre Botha at St Lucia (northern KZN) over 800 km away only 28 days after the estuary mouth opened.  This means that this fish traveled a minimum of about 30 km per day!

This remarkable migration also indicates that after being trapped in the closed estuary for several years, this fish did not loose its natural instinct to migrate to the warmer waters off KZN where leervis (called garrick in KZN) are known to spawn over the winter months.  It is possible that after getting flushed out of the estuary it met up with other leervis heading north to go and spawn. We know that other Eastern Cape fish migrated northwards as this was confirmed by the recapture of a leervis that was tagged by Chris Scholtz in the Swartkops Estuary. He tagged a beauty of 850mm FL on 15 March 2011 that was recaptured at Tugela River on 21 June 2011. This fish traveled about 790 km in the 98 days that it was free. It is just hoped that these fish got an opportunity to spawn prior to being caught. It would be sad if this genetically determined energy tapping migration was a waste of time!