Keith Rose-Innes has spent a career building the Seychelles into what it now is for fly anglers, and the most useful thing about hearing him tell it is that he remembers when none of the infrastructure existed. There was no reading material. There were no guides in the Seychelles. On an early trip he walked off the shore, immediately saw tailing bonefish, and then spent a long time failing at them — because nobody had written down how it worked yet. What follows is essentially the knowledge that has been written down since, and most of it transfers to any tropical flat you will ever stand on.
The tide is the whole day, not a detail on the board
The thing first-timers systematically underestimate is the tide — not whether it's moving, but the movement of the tides and how much time each stage actually gives you. Keith's description of learning the flats is essentially learning to move with water: as the tide generally comes in, you follow the tide and the fish that follow it.
Which stage you're on changes what is even possible. Spring tides push more water, faster, across more ground, and that matters enormously for giant trevally in particular — GTs love that influx of water onto the flats. More water arriving means more food arriving and more access to it, and a fish built to ambush in surging water shows up where the surge is. If you only take one planning lesson from this episode, it is that a Seychelles trip is booked around a tide window, not around a week on the calendar you happened to have free.
Temperature sorts the species by season
Here is the part that should shape which month you book. Different species on the same flats prefer different water temperatures, and that preference falls out along the seasons. The summer months are generally GT fishing, because giant trevally want warm water. Bonefish and several of the other species prefer cooler water.
So the honest answer to "when is the best time to go" is that it depends on what you are actually there for. If a giant trevally is the fish you have built the trip around, you want the warmer window. If you want to spend a week genuinely good at bonefish — and Keith is unambiguous that he loves catching bonefish, especially the singles and doubles rather than the schools — the cooler side of the calendar serves you better. Trying to have it perfectly both ways is how people end up disappointed in a place where nothing was wrong except the expectation.
Two rods, rigged, in your hands
This is the tactical habit most anglers arriving from trout country get wrong, and it is easy to fix. On these flats, species live in close proximity — you can catch a bonefish and within literally five minutes be looking at something entirely different. Your guide will give you an indication of what species you can expect on that particular flat at that stage of tide, but conditions change inside a single wade.
The answer is to carry a GT rod and a bonefish rod and be genuinely ready to change between them. Not one rod in the boat and one in your hand — both with you, both rigged, both ready. The opportunity that costs people their fish of the trip is almost never a bad cast. It is a giant trevally appearing while they are holding an eight-weight with a small shrimp pattern on it.
Practice the changeover on dry land before you go. Know which rod is in which hand, know where the spare goes when you cast, and rehearse it until it is boring. A guide pointing and saying one word should not be followed by thirty seconds of you sorting out equipment.
125 centimeters, and why the fishery can still hand it to you
The milestone fish in this conversation is a 125-centimeter-plus giant trevally. That's the number, and it is a genuinely rare animal. What makes it a realistic ambition rather than a lottery ticket is the state of the population, and this is the part of the episode most worth respecting.
The fishery holds an extremely healthy population of giant trevally, and the tagging data tells you why it stays that way: somewhere around 90 to 95 percent of the fish coming onto the flats are new fish. They are not recapturing the same individuals over and over. That is what a lightly pressured, properly managed fishery looks like in numbers rather than in marketing copy, and it exists because of long-running research and tagging partnerships — the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust among them — and a culture of handling fish well. Keep Fish Wet is not a slogan out there; it is the operating procedure that keeps the 90-percent figure true.
Go with that in mind. You are fishing a place that is good specifically because the people who fish it have been careful.
Gear
I am going to be straight with you: this is the one trip where you should not be taking gear advice from a blog post, including this one. Your lodge will send a specific rod, line, leader, and fly list, and it will be built around the exact flats, the exact season, and the exact species you are booked for. Follow that list. Then take it to a shop that actually sells saltwater tackle and have someone help you assemble it — a proper twelve-weight, the right lines for tropical heat, and reels with drags rated for a fish that will not stop. A local fly shop is worth the trip for this; the difference between adequate and correct saltwater gear is the difference between a story and a heartbreak.
What does transfer from home: the leader and knot work. Every one of those rigs lives or dies on connections you tie yourself, often in wind, sometimes with a fish already visible. If you want to go in with that part automatic, Tips and Tricks for Fly Fishing covers the leader building and knots you will be leaning on. And you will be standing in equatorial sun looking into water for six days straight — an FFIP five-panel cap under your polarized lenses is doing real work out there, not decorating you.
Book the tide, not the week.
