Wish List Fish

WISHLIST FISH SPRINGER / SKIPPIES

CALL THEM LADYFISH, SKIPJACK, TENPOUNDER, GIANT HERRING OR… OUR FAVOURITE, SPRINGER, BUT WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT NEGLECT THESE HIGH-SPEED TARPON COUSINS FROM YOUR BUCKET LIST.

Photo. Ed Truter

WHAT

While at first glance they may look like a tarpon bought off Wish.com, springer, to put it mildly, are amazing. Once hooked, they fight like hell, exhibit blistering speed on the run and put on an impressive aerobatic display There are various kinds of springer, but for the purposes of this exercise we’re going to focus on Elops machnata which can grow up to 1.5 metres long and weigh 12kg though they are most commonly found in the 4kg class.

WHERE

Preferring warm water, you get springer all over the world, from Gabon, to Exmouth in Australia as well as along the South African coast as far south as the Breede river. Arguably the best place to target them locally is the Swartkops River near Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape.

WHAT ED SAID Ed Truter is both a font of fishy knowledge and a Gqeberha local who has fished the Swartkops river for years. He gives us the low-down on skippies

Do you find you can actually head out for a session to specifically target Springer or are they more of a bycatch while trying for leeries, kob and grunter?

Yes, you can totally target them, but you need to know that they are around. They’re a schooling fish and when they’re in town they are generally easy to spot once you’ve got your eye in for their subtle signs. They will generally ‘roll’ a bit like tarpon, especially in a swift outgoing tide, as well as do very quick head and tail ‘rises’ as they delicately engulf shrimp, other tiny crustaceans and small baitfish off the surface. The key is to learn the difference between what a skippy breaking the surface looks like compared with large mullet. Of course that deeply forked tail is a giveaway, but it’s not always visible. Like with so many things, once you’ve seen the rolls and ’surface-nips-and-slides’ a few times you won’t forget it. It always seems that outside of places like the Swartkops, skippies are a little too unpredictable/scarce to target. My observation of skippies in the estuaries of the southern and south-eastern parts of South Africa are that there are rivers that are skippy rivers and rivers that are not. And this largely stays the same for decades. Sure, the odd school may enter any river for a while, but typically there are rivers that the skippies come back to year after year. And, within those rivers there are reaches that the skippies spend most of their time in, season after season. So once that’s known, you can usually find them there every year, usually from the late spring to early autumn. This is where local knowledge is key, speaking to the locals at a new locale, you can usually quickly determine if you’re at a skippy river or not.

What are the ideal conditions in your opinion? What do you look out for? Time of day, time of year, tides, water temp, etc?

Skippies love current, and a strong, dropping tide concentrated in channels proximal to shallow areas is almost always the best for them. The last third of a high coefficient tide is especially good and just as an estuary’s sandbanks/mudbanks/mangroves start to be significantly exposed leaving water just in the deeper channels draining the shallows. So look for current, and current lines leading off of mud banks, the convergence of flows from draining channels, accelerating current in the outside of channel bends, etc. Skippies in most of the Wild Coast to Southern Cape waters are a spring to early autumn phenomenon, they are a warm-water fish. That said, with reference to the population that hangs around Algoa Bay, these fish seem to be here all year and we’ve even caught them in the upper Swartkops River in August, but I’m of the opinion that this population is a different genetic subset to the majority of the rest of the skippy population that migrates south from warmer climes each year. Another reason I feel that way is that the Algoa Bay fish are consistently big to very big, sizes that are seldom seen with any consistency within the other rivers and along the coast until one reaches Zululand and north.

Tidal flow trumps time of day, but given that the biggest tidal variation is during the spring tidal phase (e.g. following new and full moon), during which low tide occurs between 8h00 and 12h00 (in the ocean, allow for tidal lag upstream) in our region, it’s in that window that one is most likely to encounter skippies. Skippies will often drop downstream

Eastern Cape fly fishing veteran Anthony Kruger with a smashing skippie

with the last of the outgoing tide and enter the adjacent surf zone around the river mouth, and then push back into the river with a strongly incoming tide, during which time they can also sometimes be caught in the river mouth itself, especially late in the afternoon on spring tides. Skippies are also major night time feeders, so keep that in mind if you’re serious about tangling with a few.

In terms of technique - fly tackle, favoured flies, retrieve etc, what works for you?

Skippies can be maddeningly frustrating, and far more picky than just about any trout. The thing is they often focus on extremely small prey, and especially tiny crustaceans and very small baitfish. They will chase and eat a 20cm mullet, but most of the time they’re hunting small stuff. Skippies are one of the fastest fish in the sea but that doesn’t mean that what they eat is always dashing around at Mach 3. A shrimp caught in the tide isn’t going anywhere but with the flow, so keep this in mind for your retrieves. Fish hover or slow intermediate lines. If you’re casting around skippies and not getting bit immediately, keep scaling down, and keep going more subtle with your approach, e.g. fish slower, drift the fly rather than strip it, and especially try different presentation angles and adjust the direction from which you’re casting, etc. Natural materials, especially flies tied with natural coloured feathers that kick and breathe are often best. The usual suspects of sparse bucktail Clousers, calf tail Charlies, Mud Charlies (Charlies with hackle tip kickers), Gotchas etc. all have their days (size 8 to size 2), as do traditional Cockroach tarpon flies (size 4 to 2/0) and suggestive shrimp patterns (glass shrimp to swimming prawn size - swimming prawns are cocaine to skippies). Many bonefish patterns make for good skippy flies. In low light conditions, and if the fish are chasing aggressively, big, chunkier flies like Finger Mullets, Whistlers, and Andinos and even surface chuggers/pushers/flippers will work (on the hardware side for example, skippies often love a walk-the-dog style presentation). The mistake I see made the most often with skippies is folks fishing a leader that’s too thin. It’s an unfortunate artefact of skippies’ jaw and face structure, but there are bits on their front anatomy that will quickly rub or cut through a light leader, which is complicated because the smaller flies they often like swim best with thinner leaders. I never use a leader thinner than 0.5mm when targeting skippies, it only leads to crying to Mommy when you hook and lose a big one. If you must go thinner, use the toughest flouro you can find. Skippies are very fragile creatures that easily beat themselves up, so handle them very quickly and delicately, preferably just slip the fly out with forceps and send them on their way, no Instagram posing required.