GORDO BANKS PANGAS
August 17th, 2025
We continue to see light crowds of anglers in the area. We are expecting things to stay the same until the first week or two of October, when temperatures start cooling off and storms are no longer (usually) a concern. As of now, we are enjoying a quiet period of no tropical storms threatening; according to the forecast we should be in the clear for the remainder of the month. The next four-five weeks are historically the time frame with the highest percentage of being impacted by hurricanes; we are hoping for the best. Throughout this week, we had quite a bit of cloud cover with cooler breeze (mostly south winds) in the afternoons.
The tuna bite continues to be consistent as we are catching limits daily (5 per license). Most of these tuna are small, averaging 5-10 pounds. This was a better week in terms of size as in the last 2 weeks, many of these fish were under 5 pounds. Iman produced more quality tuna, anywhere from 5 to 25 pounds, though the bite was not as active as Inner Gordo. When the tuna came up at Gordo, some boats were able to land double digits in 15-30 minutes. This weekend, one of our pangas reported landing 15 tuna (3 licenses), releasing around 20 of them, and 2 dorado, all before 8:00 am. We have seen more dorado at the Gordo this week, even some 20-30 pounders later in the week. The biggest dorado we saw this week was pushing 40 pounds. The tuna and dorado were most active on live and dead sardines. Some boats tried drifting strips of squid and were able to land 20-30 pound tuna.
Sharks were not an issue this week. Because of this, more boats started slow trolling bigger baits (skipjack, small tuna, and bulito) in the areas of San Luis, Iman, and Inner/Outer Gordos. On Friday, one of our pangas caught 2 bulito at the Inner Gordo on dead sardines while fishing for tuna. Since they already had their limit, they decided to slow troll them for a chance at a bigger tuna or dorado. Within 5 minutes of trolling, they hooked into a 121-pound yellowfin. This tuna put up a good fight, close to 2 hours, as the angler decided to land it solo and they were battling some swell and winds. This same day, another panga hooked into a big Black Marlin, estimated at around the 500-pound mark. They hooked this fish at the Outer Gordo on a live skipjack at around 11:00 am. They had this fish on for 5 hours and ended up losing it as winds made it a difficult fight. On Wednesday, one of the pangas caught a 400-pound Black Marlin on a live skipjack. This fish was hooked in the areas of Outer Iman. As we continue to hear more reports from big marlin, we are confident it will be an interesting year at the Bisbee’s tournaments in October.
Good Fishing, Brian
