Anglers –
September 9, 2017

The cleanup from the devastating flood damage produced by Tropical Storm Lidia last week continues. Most of the region has now had power, water and telephone services restored. Though many areas will never be the same after this event and recovery work will continue for months to come. So far the month of September has started off predictably unforgiving, historically always being the most vulnerable to strikes from Tropical Storm systems. Not many tourists in town this week, as local airport had been closed and many others canceled their planned trips due to concerns over conditions, others canceled because of damage to particular hotels. Weather has stabilized in recent days, though tropical cloud formations are present and have produced isolated rain showers. Ocean has been calm and sportfishing fleets resumed operations with not many charters launching because of light numbers of anglers. Good news is that no new storms are heading our way at this time.

Bait options were more limited, no sardinas so far this week, bait vendors remained local, involved in clean up operations, not enough action for them to travel long distances to scout out new resources of sardinas, with so few charters boats going out to make it profitable for them. Reports from the East Cape were that they had plenty of schooling sardinas in their area, but not many charters going out either. Local charters relied mainly on slabs of squid for bait, this seemed to work fine for the yellowfin tuna action. Trolling lures produced dorado and scattered wahoo action. Water clarity was stirred up, lots of current moving around as well. Early in the week much of the inshore zone was very dirty and green, conditions cleared rapidly, though lots of debris is spread throughout the entire region, so caution was needed when motoring about in order to avoid any collision with heavier objects.

The most consistent action found was for yellowfin tuna in the 10 to 15 lb. class near Iman Bank, drift fishing with strips of squid is what the tuna were striking on. On Tuesday there was one monster yellowfin tuna landed from a super panga while fishing on the Gordo Banks, the fish hit later in the late morning on a strip of squid and weighed in at a whopping 314 lb., making it the first official super cow landed this season for the local panga fleet out of La Playita. Other action on these same grounds produced a handful of wahoo and marlin strikes, the big tuna are definitely in the area, they had been late to show up this summer, but are lurking on these banks now.
Dorado were found in good numbers, mainly by trolling medium sized lures, once the schools were found they would readily hit bait. Sizes varied up to 20 lb., though the majority were smaller in size. Remember the limit on dorado is two fish per license, so it is always better to try and release the small fish, especially the females and hold out to try to fill your limit on a couple of better size specimens.

We did not try any inshore action this week, not really the time of year for that now. Not much bottom action found either, strong currents made that option tougher, plus just mot many charter boats were going out, most all of these were looking for species such as yellowfin tuna and dorado.

The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 24 charters for the storm shortened week, with anglers reporting a fish count of: 1 striped marlin, 22 white skipjack, 82 dorado, 5 wahoo, 120 yellowfin tuna and 15 triggerfish.

Good fishing, Eric