About 500 crates of sardines have been netted at Warner Beach on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. The silvery delicacies are fetching a price of between R400 to R600 a crate.
Dubbed the greatest shoal on earth, the annual sardine run attracts crowds who are eager to witness the nets being pulled out of the water.
Fishing expert Adam Kamdar says these are just pilot shoals being netted currently.
“The main shoal is so huge it’s hard to describe. There’s two lines of thick, black mass that’s moving up from the Transkei. We haven’t seen them yet in our KZN waters. We are seeing thousands of dolphins following them, millions of cormorants and gulls diving down upon them so that’s really quiet a spectacle that’s moving up and it’s quite far away. These are the pilot shoals that are moving ahead of the main shoals and that’s giving us the excitement of the sardine run on the KZN coastline,” Kamdar explains.
