Socotra FlyFishing Season 2023
After having scratched the surface of this unique fishery in 2022, it’s useless to say our level of excitement was really high about the next Fly Fishing session, and since we already knew some tricks about the fishery and how to deal with it, the hype was even higher than high.
This time we focused on expanding our exploration to further areas and consolidating what we explored in the previous trip, and I think we managed it.
Since the beginning me and my mate Johan having caught plenty of Parrots before we have been more focused on long walking and seeking more along beaches instead of focusing on rocky bays, but our friends who hadn’t been here before, were of course very happy to tame some big Parrots, which eventually they did properly.
This time Parrots were very happy but for some reason, the landing rate has been extremely miserable, while in 2022 we landed about 50% of the fish hooked, and this time we landed about 15% only, but the hooking rate has been pretty good with over 130 fish hooked in 4 anglers in 2 weeks, spending only a margin of our time on that. If we spent more time on Parrot we reckon we could have easily passed 200-250 hook up, Johan alone lost 10 in one day, and he managed to lose 27 fish nonstop beating my record of 22.
So, it can be frustrating but also very rewarding. In another hand this season we saw a lot of GT from the beach but we didn’t manage to land any, and we saw some excellent African Pompano including a huge one over 110 cm, but they just didn’t commit to our flies.
A proper highlight of the trip has been the Bonefish, we found them for a few days in a row and all of them were fish over 70 cm with the biggest landed, was 78 cm, which makes it pretty sick, also considering that we saw fish over 90 cm.
On top, we caught plenty of Blue Bar Jacks of record size, some nice Bluefin, Blue Trigger, Sweetlips, other types of Parrotfish, and Green Jobfish.
Overall it has been a crazy trip, fishing is never easy but the reward is also on another scale, and we are sure in the near future we will start to land bigger and bigger Bones, maybe a World Record, who knows?
Photos by Johan Persson Friberg
