Santer

A DEEP-WATER REEF FISH RELEASED BADLY IS A DEAD FISH THAT LOOKED FINE.

Brought up from thirty metres or more, the swimbladder expands and the fish cannot swim down. It floats, drifts away and is taken. Nothing about that is visible as harm to the angler who watched it go.

USE A DESCENDING DEVICE where the fish is going back. A weighted release clip that carries the fish down and lets go at depth recompresses the swimbladder and works far better than venting.

IF VENTING IS THE ONLY OPTION, it needs a proper hollow venting tool, the correct position behind the pectoral fin, and somebody who has been shown how. A knife or a hook does damage rather than good.

AND MINIMISE THE TIME AT THE SURFACE. Decide before the fish is aboard whether it is being kept, and if it is not, get it back down quickly.

A FISH THAT SWIMS AWAY IS NOT A FISH THAT IS FINE. The United States fisheries agency's own field work found that rockfish surviving a recompressed release were still affected by capture and barotrauma for THIRTY TO SIXTY DAYS afterwards. Success is not the fish disappearing; it is the fish being alive two months later, and everything above is about buying that.

SOUTH AFRICA REGULATES SEA FISHING SPECIES BY SPECIES, WHICH IS NOT HOW MOST COUNTRIES DO IT.

A recreational permit is the entry ticket and not the whole of it. On top of it sits a minimum size and a daily bag limit SET PER FISH, a closed season on a small number of species, and a cumulative daily cap across everything caught — so being inside the limit for each species separately does not put you inside the limit overall.

THERE IS A CAP ON HOOKS on a rod-and-line permit. A spearfishing permit is separate, allows no breathing apparatus beyond a snorkel, and PROHIBITS SPEARFISHING IN AN ESTUARY — a flat ban rather than a limit, and the rule visitors most often do not know.

A LANDED FISH MUST KEEP ITS HEAD AND TAIL so its length can be checked. Nothing caught on a recreational permit may be sold by anyone. And a small list of species may not be caught, landed or possessed at all.

FISHINGHQ DOES NOT PRINT THE FIGURES, and the reason is on this page rather than in a policy document: the department's own guidance says adjustments may be forthcoming given the acknowledged crisis of linefish, the numbers differ by species and by area and by whether you were standing on a beach or sitting in a boat, and a stale figure on a fishing site is worse than no figure at all. Get the current position from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, and get the protected-area position from whichever body manages the stretch of coast you are on.

A reef sparid of moderate growth rate occupying a very wide depth band, from twenty metres down to three hundred. Most of the population sits deeper than recreational fishing reaches, which is a real if accidental form of protection and part of why the species carries a daily bag limit rather than one.

Spawns over reef with pelagic eggs and larvae. As with several sparids the species shows the family's hermaphroditic tendencies, though the specifics are less well documented for South African waters than for the endemics that South African research has concentrated on.

A reef feeder on invertebrates, cephalopods and small fish over structure. Squid is the standard bait. It is caught as part of a mixed reef catch alongside slinger and the rock cods rather than as a species targeted on its own.

Vision and lateral line at close range over deep reef in low light. The large eye relative to the head is the usual signature of a fish that works in dim water.

Reef-associated year-round with no documented migration to plan around. Availability to a recreational boat is set by weather and by whether the accessible reef holds fish at the shallow end of a range that mostly sits deeper.

A regular component of the South African east-coast and southern-coast reef catch, taken from ski-boats on squid over structure. It is a commercial species with a recreational limit of a daily bag limit at a minimum size. Its practical significance is as one of the species that makes a mixed reef bag rather than as a target in its own right.

A moderate-depth reef fish, handled like the rest of them.

DESCEND ANYTHING GOING BACK. Barotrauma applies from about thirty metres and this fish comes from deeper than that.

MIND THE TRAILING FILAMENTS — they tangle in a fish box and in a landing net, and pulling a tangled fish free damages the fin.

STIFF SPINES, de-hooker, wet hands, horizontal support.