Cape Town - The fishing industry is over the moon after pilchard, which baffled the sector and scientists by migrating to the east and south coasts, returned to their traditional west coast grounds.
For about five years the fish, a staple food for thousands of people, have been caught off Mossel Bay, adding to transport costs for the canning factories on the west coast.
Andrew Marshall, chief executive of Oceana, the diversified fishing company, said last week no one could explain why the fish, which were big and healthy, had come back to the west coast.
Carl van der Lingen, a scientist with Marine Coastal Management, said that in addition to the migration of the fish, there had also been a change in their spawning. The last time this happened on the west coast was in 2000.
"This reappearance of the fish on the west coast has us all excited," Van der Lingen said. "When we were looking at this eastward shift, one of the hypotheses was that it was ... climate change that was making the less hospitable or the south coast more hospitable for sardines.''
Van der Lingen said the change in sardine spawning on the west coast and sometimes on the east coast seemed to occur over five to seven years.
A winter research ship left Cape Town yesterday, to work from the mouth of the Orange River to Mossel Bay and possibly as far as Port St Johns, depending on the weather and time.
"We'll get a better idea where the fish are. I, for one, do not believe the whole population has shifted back to the west coast,'' said Van der Lingen.
The fact that fishing companies had been making good catches for the past six weeks meant that there were large amounts of fish, he said.
Andrew Hendricks, chairman of Seavuna fishing at Mossel Bay, said sardine fishing near Mossel Bay had brought economic benefits to the town through the creation of jobs.
The migration of the fish from the west coast, where many of the canning factories were located, was devastating because a lot of people lost their jobs, he said.
Frikkie Tolken, a skipper with Premier Fishing and chairman of the West Coast Pelagic Fishermen's Association, said the outlook for the future was very positive.