THE LACCADIVES
When Yves Fraisseix, our good friend in India, was scouting for the right destination to start a new fishing operation, the Laccadive Islands was just one of several possibilities. Then he started to ask around about the necessary permits to run a fishing operation on the islands. Most reactions were like ”You can’t”, ”Don’t do it”, ”Too complicated” and ”Impossible” – and those were the more positive ones. In Yves’ own words, ”that’s when I knew I had found the right place!”
We all know that – all things equal – the lesser fishing pressure, the better fishing. Here was a whole group of islands in the Indian Ocean that no one had ever fished! For Yves, all that was left was to make the impossible happen. He eventually did, and when all the red tape was finally cleared, and he got the permissions to bring foreign anglers to the Laccadives, it was just a matter of finding the right boats and someone to run them, right? Well, not really…
We won’t go into detail about how the locals first thought, he was downright mad, when he returned fish (=food) to the sea – and as a consequence refused to take him out again. Or how six different Indian authorities each need to approve a ten page form for every client. The thing is, when you throw your popper toward a reef that has probably never been fished before – you don’t care about all the obstacles that had to be cleared on the way. Yves took care of that, anyway.