A short announcement to start with: for personal and family reasons this will be the last report for some months. As things look now I hope to be back on air some point in the final quarter of the year but will have to see how it goes. On the fishing side there is little to report I´m afraid. May is a traditional off-season here as far as tourists in general are concerned and the still very disrupted flight situation didn`t help. Also the Southeast Monsoon developed in a textbook way this year, rising in strength gradually from about the 10th and is these days establishing itself in the usual 15-17 knots range. The strong peaks are still to come but that will be just a matter of time and the swell is already at around 2m. Thus the bits of fishing done happened mostly along that first week of the month. Mervin had a day popping with a hard fishing guest from Switzerland raising a handful of GTs but no strike from those. The next day jigging at the Drop went rather slow to average on top. Else beyond a very few trolling trips of the occasionally fishing boats it was just Greg on Topwater with a handful of mixed trips. Some popping produced Bluefin Trevallies and smaller GTs with this one sticking out a bit. 

The other disciplines like jigging and trolling also worked but the swell building up made it tough, or rather too tough, for some guests. Others messed up themselves though: Greg told me about finding and hooking a Sailfish for a guest who badly wanted one after so far always losing them. Well, what do you expect when you start filming yourself with your mobile phone while fighting it? Line went slack and the Sail was off before Greg coud intervene. Shame as a pic would have done this meager report good. So only a small album of the other mixed catches of those days for a close.

So that will be it for a while now. I will try to post bits that reach me on the facebook site for the coming months until these reports will come online again. Keep well and safe until then.

As you are surely aware, the situation around Iran has not settled, and subsequently it should be no surprise to you that this April edition comes along much shorter than usually for this time of the year. What should have been one of the main tourist and fishings seasons here in Seychelles was nothing less but a disaster with cancellations flooding in for everyone. Especially hard hit was poor Mervin who looked to have hardly any day off in April, but found himself left with about no charters at all. It was pretty much only Volker from Germany, well-known to regular followers of this report, who had come for a family holiday on short notice and had been hoping to maybe get one trip with Mervin. As Mervin now had plenty of time they did a small handful of those, though mainly in combination with island and snorkeling excursions while fishing was to provide Volker`s little son Kjell with a taste as he is now old enough for it. With some help of course, but the youngster did well as you can see.

My place`s position allows me a good view of the boats that mainly do excursions with the odd trolling and bottom fishing trip in between, moving in and out of the bay. Their activity has been really low and hardly ever I saw fishing rods. The few trips produced solid mixed bags of smaller gamefish though. A bit more lively was the situation for Greg with a good handful of trips for various kinds of fishing. About all of these worked really well as the album shows. 

A picture which I think should stand out from the album is this one of a Sailfish hooked by Greg on a topwater casting lure. Brilliant shot, or rather still from a video clip.

Really nice stuff all in all. Just a shame that not more people could benefit from the good bite and the calm conditions nearly all along. Mervin meantime with nothing to do had one of his special guests come over for a spontaneous catamaran trip to the Outer Islands last week but they found themselves limited by an already quite strong Southeast down there. Since the beginning of the week he is now fishing with a group of Israelis who somehow made it here, but just since then the weather became somewhat instable and he was also not too happy with the bite. What he told me did not sound too bad actually but I got no pics of that yet. Maybe I can present you these in the next edition.

For the preceeding reports check the archive.