After a couple of cracking shallow water sambo sessions over the past few weeks, I guess we were due a slow day.......and man, was it slow! It would seem the combination of tide, moon phase and the colour of my jocks meant we had to work very hard for every hit on jig.

Me and Langa went to a few spots we had done well in the shallows, and whilst there were enough signs of sambos on the sounder to suggst we should have been hooking up, no go no matter what we did....big jigs, small jigs, fast, slow, stopped, pharrrrrrrrk. Softies did not help either. Baron was in his tug nearby and he had similar issues.

TimVB and Silly were in Sillies new rig (nice one mate!) trying another spot a bit deeper that we had also done well at previously...no go there either. I am not sure, but from the radio silence, I think they may have scored a globe for the day................

After several hours without a hit and in quite a bit of dispair, we headed out deeper and got a few fish on the sounder.....again, no action, and in desperation, I got out my favourite jig and on lighter gear to try and entice a hit as it was obvious there were sambos there from the angry red marks on the sounder.

Finally, had a hit but did not connect, but then 2 cranks later, bang, on, finally......it was about now that I started to regret going down in line size and even worse, I only had my Daiwa Tierra 4000, as I left all the good light gear at home............luckily the sambo was not too large but more than a good match for the 4000 size reel. Langa hooked up about 5 seconds after me, but his albright leader knot failed (evidenced by a bimini with the loop entact......time to learn the FG knot Matt.......).

About an hour later, I hooked up again, and after a huge fight on the Tierra and backing up on the fish 3 times, what I thought was gonna be a 20 kg plus dhu turned ou to be a fouled hooked sambo about the same size as the first......strangest fight I have ever had and a lot like a big shu. Dissapointed in some regards but given the ban, I was glad it was not a dhu as even though we release all big dhuies regardless of ban or not, some no doubt still die from the trauma of catchand release.

Anyhow, very hard day and we did a LOT of miles and a lot of jigging for 2 sambos.......makes the good days even better!

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