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Fishing Tackle
Seychelles – Part 4 : Saltwater fly fishing off the end of the earth
23 April 2009
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If you want the best, you’ve got to go and find the best – there is no other way. Don’t for one second think that there are no places left on earth where the fishing is close to as virgin as it can be, but these sorts of locations require effort and usually some kind of increased cost. But what price paradise ? Let’s assume you have kitted yourself out with the latest saltwater fly fishing rods and reels and have even invested in a few casting lessons to make sure that double-haul is totally up to scratch. A couple of trips to the Bahamas and perhaps Los Roques (admittedly fantastic destinations in their own rights) have given you the bug, or rather infected you with that lifelong, impossible to shake off, saltwater fever.
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Your reels are now battle hardened with the outrageous runs from feisty bones and you even managed to smash a few nice barracudas and jacks that were lurking with the utmost menace upon innocent flats. But what about the next step ? How about going somewhere so remote, so wild and so totally off the scale that you’ll spend your few hours back in civilisation frantically booking up again for the next year. Believe me, you need the ultra-remote atolls of the Seychelles in your life.
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Mere words will never do justice to the sheer splendour of these wild atolls, with names such as Cosmoledo, Providence and Astove, sitting alone and desolate many hundreds of miles away from the Seychelles’ inner islands. The Indian Ocean out here is at times calm, benign and roasting hot, and at other times like a women scorned with the sheer savagery of wind and rain. If you fish with the right guides who really know these atolls then you’ll go at the right time of year and also put yourself right in the middle of a fly fishing utopia, the like of which I have never seen anywhere else.
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These atolls are totally pristine and are home to an incredible array of species that you can take on that shiny new saltwater kit. You will be walking and fishing over flats (hard sand and turtle grass), reefs, sandbanks and cuts, looking for fish to cast to. This is sight fishing in its purest form and I know of nowhere else on earth that offers so many shots at big flats-based giant trevally, surely the most aggressive fish there is. The sheer relish with which these marauding predators smash into your flies takes some getting used to; a #12 outfit and the guts to use it hard is essential.
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Big bonefish abound in ankle-deep water, indeed the guys are regularly taking 10lb plus fish on crab and shrimp patterns, plus various big and colourful trigger fish species can be seen all the time. There is no better area of the world to chase big milkfish, surely one of the most cult-like saltwater fly fishing quarries around. And what about nailing huge bumphead parrotfish or Napoleon wrasse on the flats as well ? Go and find out what the best is like, and then spend the rest of the time asking yourself why you aren’t back there.