It pays to be flexible.
The Seychelles November 2017
We had originally intended to target sailfish with our teasers, pitch-baits and flies. Regrettably sailfish were scarce during our stay so there was no point in trying to get one to take a fly. Generally speaking I think it is fair to say that the fishing was unusually tough over the two weeks. We quickly packed up trolling and concentrated on fishing the hot-spots with jigs and poppers. Throughout our entire stay we had had the best results when jigging. At times slow jigging was absolutely awesome and for the first couple of days we caught the entire gamut of reef fish including tuna, some beautiful groupers and no end of sharks.
Unfortunately after 5 days I ran out of the jigs especially designed for this purpose. Sharks, barracudas and wahoos attacked them on the drop and they quickly disappeared.
While changing marks we trolled a teaser chain behind the boat and always had a freshly rigged mackerel on a circle hook ready to cast, a so-called pitch-bait. This attracted 3 sailfish, all of which were caught.
We spent one whole day concentrating exclusively on GTs and popper fishing. It turned out to be very good day indeed with fish of between 110 and 125 cm in length. By the end of the day we hooked up on 6 out of 7 strikes.
With the exception of 3 calm days we had to brave 20 knot winds and snotty seas. We had our magic moments when jigging, although the conditions stretched us to our limits on occasions and we came off second best. We had a triple strike of good doggies but were unable to catch one of them. Two big doggies inhaled our slowly jigged bonito baits but couldn’t be stopped either. We even had to steam after a really good fish because I was close to being spooled with 350 meters of line out – here again to no avail in the end.
Stephan Kreupl, December 2017
