I hope very much you all had a better start to the New Year as on my end it was really bad so far: another passing in the family, a wrecked car, one of my three cats gone missing and some legal documents I signed in September back in Germany got lost between notary and court so I had to rush there to sign these again were just my main troubles. This all just mentioned to apply for your leniance that I was not on top of the anyway limited fishing activity here and can only deliver a very short overview this time. The first week of the year saw the last trips by the holiday season tourists, mainly trolling and often half days, that produced the usual mixed bags of fish. Then the weather turned bad for nearly two weeks. Not a problem for most skippers as the islands had emptied from tourists meantime. But as I had two groups for Mervin he struggled quite a bit to get as many of the planned trips done as possible, but got there pretty much with Richard from la Digue on LadyC stepping in. Both groups were rather inexperienced and also somewhat undertackled for our jigging and popping. So with the rather unvafourable conditions on top and a pumping current the jigging was limited to the shallows, and subsequently the catches while good in numbers were rather unspectacular. 

Along the final week of the month weather and sea conditions were not perfect but reasonably fishable. Just there was about no-one here to make use of that. Only the TopWater crew had a few small trips for fly and spinning. Bit sad that Peter from Sweden encountered the same unlucky experience of a very slow bite and losing the best fish of the day by a broken split ring he had two years ago. Bizarr how such can happen. Sorry that this is all for this time already. But at least my cat that I never expected to see again after nearly 3 weeks of absence returned a few days ago. No fish caught could have made me happier.

For the preceeding reports check the archive.