Fishing
A big part of the fieldwork done at SASC is collecting data to survey the Elasmobranch species and distribution along the coast. Some of the SASC team went down the New Harbour to see what we could catch. We arrived at around half-eight and began to unpack our gear and get the hand lines baited up. Within 20 minutes of fishing, I felt a big bite on my line. A few seconds later, something was swimming away with my bait. It was a small Common smoothhound shark, the first of that species we caught in the New Harbour!
After the initial success, the number of bites we got slowed down, so we decided to move to a slightly deeper area off the end of the pier where Guy had caught a Dark shyshark. Once we experimented with bait and where we were casting our lines, Guy and Nadia found a deeper hole where there seemed to be many small Dark shysharks. After catching the Smoothhound, I didn’t catch any more. The others managed to catch lots of Dark shysharks! Over the day, we caught twenty little Darkies so we were kept very busy measuring and tagging them all.
