In the Loop Fly Fishing Magazine - Issue 19

I’M BEWILDERED and overwhelmed.

Dizzy and languid, like a boxer who has just left the ring - humiliated and defeated. The scenes from a full week of hysterically exciting tropical fly fishing flickers before my feverish eyes, while my gazing eyes emptily skirts across the shimmering blue water, which the catamaran transects with surgical precision.

We’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean on our way to our resort on Alphonse Island in the Seychelles. The shiny white flats, the moonscape-like coral formations and the riveting tidal currents, which - in combination with vast elongated, subaqueous meadows of turtle grass and toothy, weather-beaten outer reefs - constitute the heart and soul of the St. Francois Atoll and its hunting grounds, now unobtrusively fade away behind us – like a bittersweet diminuendo that quietly yields to total silence.

All of it stings relentlessly inside the depths of my soul and, as I cast one last glance behind me and take in the scenery for the last time, I suddenly realize that I’ve never been so sad having to pack up and leave a fishing destination as I am now. It’s a veritable tragedy!