Cape Verde Rock, Beach and Sea Fishing
Garoupa, Sailfish, Wahoo off Santa Maria Sal.
Fish are a staple diet of Cape Verdeans and the locals fish from
all the islands. You can nearly always buy fresh fish in even the
smallest ports. These can cost as little as 1p for a sardine on
Sao Nicolau or £2 per kilogram for yellowfin tuna, cut to
size on Sal.
Wahoo, albacore, yellowfin tuna, grouper and dorado are plentiful
close offshore in most of the Cape Verde islands. Tiger
shark are around further out.
Zum Fischermann fishing trips off Santa Maria
Uwe and Julia a German couple organise fishing from Santa Maria
in Sal. This is the easiest place to arrange fishing if you are
a casual fisherman. Aficionados will want to go to the other islands,
where there are more big game fish. They will cook the catch at
the Zum Fischermann restaurant.The best time for Tuna is August.
.A half-day trip costs around £30. Longer trips into deeper
water find sailfish, swordfish, kingfish and maybe even blue, striped
or white marlin and cost £55 per day. Marlin can be caught
in May/June through to October but are more plentiful off Sao Nicolau.
Carlos - an English-speaking former European champion sea angler
who has fished in competitions throughout Scotland, Cornwall. Wales
and ireland lives in Palmeira. he can arrange half-day boat trips
to catch Garoupa in the seas off the West coast of Sal, We caught
over a dozen in half an hour as well as a sole and other unidentified
tropical fish, See one of the garoupa to the left.
An Italian also offers four hour fishing trips at €120 for
common ground fish or €180 for wahoo or tuna further out. Not
reccomended as the price is extortionate.
Off Murdeira from the rocks in Murdeira Bay
M from Glos is enthusiatic about the local fishing.
"We received fishing advice from a guy (name of Joseph, you may
see him striding over the rocks by the sea wearing long black "shorts";these
were mine but I did not like them so I gave them to Joseph) who
earns his living fishing from the rocks just outside your villa,
and has been doing so all of his life (he is 46 years old). He doesn't
use any fancy tackle, either a hand line or a bamboo pole, a pebble
possibly as a weight and proper fishhooks. His key to catching big
fish (which he sells to the restaurant) is to spear crabs with a
a sharpened metal rod and use them as bait, not a whole crab, just
some of it's flesh. The big fish go crazy for it. We have seen people
using spark plugs and bent nails as weights. I spent over £100 on
beachcasting equipment before I set off for Sal. This was a waste
of money as the volcanic rocks are not suitable for beachcasting.
My advice is to take a telescopic spinning rod and reel with 10
pound breaking strain line. We lost all of our purchased floats
and ended-up slicing through wine bottle corks and making holes
through the middle. We lost all of our hooks eventually on the volcanic
rocks so I would advise taking at least 50 various size hooks. We
were catching tiddlers up to 1/2 lb and were very happy doing so
but Joseph had to catch reasonable size fish in order to survive
and every fish that he caught appeared to be 3lb or over. A few
days before departure I hooked a small silver "angel fish" which
looked like bacofoil being jigged around in the water as I was reeling
it in. A large eel (about 4 feet long and about 4-5 inches thick)
took a fancy to the angel fish and clamped its considerable teeth
around the poor little fish. The ensuing battle with a large eel
was quite exciting and certainly got the heart pumping. Eventually
the eel unclamped it's jaws and disappeared and then the fish jumped
off the hook as I was using barbless hooks intended for Carp fishing.
The handline in your storeroom would be entirely suitable for catching
the same sort of fish that keep Joseph alive. All that your visitors
would need would be a range of sea hooks and weights. A metal rod
sharpened at one end (with a cork over the end for the suitcase)
might be the answer to successful fishing. This would be essential
to spearing the crabs. The smaller fish will eat absolutely anything;
crabs, bread, pasta, steak-rind, sweetcorn, peas, butterbeans, chickpeas.
My first fish was caught spinning with a tiny little shiny lure
way past the restaurant. "
N from Warwicks took a local boat with 7 people out from Sal
"Birgit gave us the name of Carlos ( a German former champion
sea angler) who took us out from Santa Maria pier. We had a fantastic
morning and caught our first wahoo, which they call serra. We also
fished from the rocks at Murdeira and caught two fish"
