One of the best parts of hosting this Yellow Dog trip to Providence Atoll is that all my guests are super fun and most have been friends for years. Furthermore, all the guides are as well. All have guided for my trips over the years and some I’ve visited in South Africa and they have visited me in Idaho. Today I fished with Jeff Smith and Dave Boyd, both of whom were with me in Astove and Cosmo last December. And our guide was my longtime friend, Brendan Becker.
Brendan has long history on the salt. We first met on Farquhar in 2014. I landed my first bumpy with Brendan. We’ve fished smallmouth yellowfish in Lesotho and yellow permit in St. Brandon’s Atoll in Mauritius. It was such a pleasure to share the boat with these three pals.
The only not pleasurable thing today was my stomach. I was hurting and whatever ailed me stole my energy. I kicked back and watched early in the day. The tide was high to start so Brendan set the guys up for a deep dredge with sinking lines and heavy Clouser’s.
Being Providence Atoll is one of the worlds most remote fishing locations, the bottom of the sea is alive. The guys got the flies down deep above the coral heads and within seconds they hooked up. They caught an assortment of grouper including this beautiful white-blotched.
Around 10am the tide dropped enough to wade the flats. I did my best and followed Jeff and Dave as they walked along hoping for a GT. Fishing was slow though. The highlight for me was the beauty of Cerch Island. There’s not much land in Providence but Cerch is the island to the south.
Fishing was slow. Likely because it was incredibly hot and nearly windless. As I mentioned yesterday, these saltwater fish like wind and tidal current that create cool water exchanges back and forth from the flats to the bluewater. Because it was slow I played around and caught a few different interesting fish. This is the blacktip grouper. There are lots of these handsome fellas in the Seychelles.
Not much luck came our way overall. But in a nine day trip, we’ll all make up for it. We still managed to scrape out a few fish and I won’t lie; the guys had a couple shots at good size GT’s. No matter what happens, it was a great day with friends and we enjoyed a nice beer for the boat ride back.
Fishing was mediocre for the rest of the group as well. Everyone gave their 100% however and there were some fish caught. Probably the most incredible one of the day was this stunning looking saddleback grouper by Rich. Good times!
To see more photos from this incredible Yellow Dog Trip be sure to visit my Instagram page – @jeffcurrier65