When to Go to the Seychelles: Two Winds, and What They Do to Your Week

The honest answer to when you should come is that the Seychelles work all year, and that this is not the useful answer. The islands sit a few degrees south of the equator, so the temperature barely moves – roughly 24 to 32 °C, every month – and the sea stays between about 26 to 27 °C in July and August and 29 to 30 °C in April. Nothing in the calendar makes the country too hot, too cold or closed.

What does change is the wind, and the wind changes almost everything else: which side of an island is calm, which beach collects seaweed, how clear the water is when you put your face in it, and whether a boat crossing is pleasant or a chore.

The two seasons are two wind directions

South-east trade winds, roughly May to October. Drier, breezier, a degree or two cooler in feel. June and July are the windiest months of the year. Seas on south- and south-east-facing coasts get choppy, crossings between the islands are bumpier, and the wind pushes seaweed onto the southern shores.

North-west monsoon, roughly December to March. Warmer, more humid, much wetter – January is the wettest month – with rain that typically arrives as heavy downpours rather than all-day grey. The wind is lighter, so the sea is often glassy, but now it is the north-west-facing coasts taking the weather.

November and April are the turning points, and they are the reason this article exists. April in particular is the calmest and warmest month of the year, when one wind has dropped and the other has not started.

What that means beach by beach

This is the part that decides a holiday, and it is the opposite of intuitive: the best beach in July is not the best beach in January.

• May to September: the north-west-facing bays are the sheltered ones – Beau Vallon on Mahé, Anse Lazio on Praslin. Meanwhile seaweed washes up on south-facing shores, including the south coast of Praslin.
• October to April: the wind comes round and the deposits land on Praslin’s north-east side instead, along Côte d’Or, while the southern beaches settle down.

Which is to say that a trip in either main season is fine as long as you are on the right coast that week. The detail per beach is in the beach guide.

Under the surface: April–May and late September–November

For anyone whose trip is really about the reef, the two transition windows are the ones to aim for. With the wind down, the water settles and visibility is at its best – around 30 metres on a good day, against a great deal less when a trade wind has been stirring the shallows for a week.

Those are also the windows in which the guided trips do what they promise. A calm day on the Sister, Coco and Félicité catamaran tour – €141.18, 4.8 stars from 149 reviews – and a windy one are genuinely different products for the same money. More on the choice between shore and boat in the snorkelling guide.

Wildlife has its own calendar

Three dates worth knowing, because they do not line up with the weather:

• Whale sharks pass the granitic islands in the later part of the year; off Mahé they are most often reported from August to October.
• Hawksbill turtles nest from October to February, with the peak around December. They come ashore in daylight here, which is unusual, and on protected beaches it is a genuinely reliable sighting rather than a lottery.
• Seabird colonies are at their loudest in the south-east trade wind months, when the breeding season is in full swing on the islands that have them.

If one of those is the reason for the trip, it outranks the weather. A slightly choppier sea in October is a fair trade for turtles.

Cyclones: the question people ask, answered properly

The Seychelles lie outside the main cyclone belt, and that is a real structural advantage over other Indian Ocean destinations: there is no season here in which trips are routinely cancelled for storms.

It is not the same as nothing ever happening. When a cyclone tracks well to the south of the islands, the swell it sends can still reach them, and a boat day gets called off because of sea state rather than because of rain overhead. That is the realistic version: weather cancels individual days here, not weeks.

Crowds and prices move separately from the weather

The busiest weeks are Christmas and New Year, and then the European summer holidays in July and August. Neither corresponds to the best conditions. Late April, May, September and early October are the quiet stretches with good sea conditions – the closest thing to an objectively better time to come.

Tour prices themselves are fairly stable across the year in this inventory; what moves sharply is accommodation, and the difference between a room in early December and the same room on 27 December is not small.

If you only want one recommendation

April, or late September into October. Calm water, the best visibility, fewer people, and no need to think hard about which coast you are sleeping on.

If those months do not work, come anyway and adjust: in the trade wind months, base yourself with a north-west-facing beach in reach; in the monsoon months, expect short heavy rain and a calm sea, and book boat days early in the trip so there is room to move one. The full range of crossings and day boats is on the island hopping page – 35 listings, from €46.53 – and the Sainte Anne marine park trips are the ones that run most reliably in mixed weather, because the bay they work in is sheltered.