Anglers –
November 11, 2017
Peak season now for the panga fleets out of San Jose del Cabo, this Sunday is the annual Wahoo Tournament, which also coincides with the sanctioned Iron Man event in Los Cabos, many roads will be closed off and patience will be needed to navigate in any direction. It can always be a challenge this time of year, as everyone seems to want to visit and go fishing all on the same dates. Another couple of weeks and things will settle back down to more ordinary schedules.
Ocean temperatures are now in the 81 to 84 degrees range, still a few degrees higher than normal for this time frame. Early in the week we felt the season’s first real consistent wind patterns from the north develop, this made for much tougher fishing conditions in the direction of the Gordo Banks, Iman and San Luis Banks. Many charters opted to fish in the direction of Cabo San Lucas, in calmer waters, catching good number of fish, though the grade of yellowfin tuna were smaller, off of Palmilla Point there was a hot bite for football sized tuna, with a few dorado and wahoo mixed in. Bait netters were still finding sardinas, despite the heavy pressure, the bait schools were now mainly concentrated around Palmilla beaches. Other bait options included some caballito, ballyhoo, slabs of squid and chihuil.
Last weekend the Los Cabos WON Tuna Jackpot was held and local La Playita team “Estrella del Norte” with team captain James Rosenwald and mate/angler Adrian Miranda who caught the winning 338 lb. yellowfin tuna, taking home a cool quarter of a million dollars for their efforts, congratulations to them. In tune up for the event last week, on Tuesday, a 323 lb. yellowfin tuna was caught from the panga Killer II with skipper Chame Pino, in last week’s report we mistaken did not mention the angler who actually landed that fish, this was local Los Cabos resident Jack Dudenhoeffer. This week we had several other cow sized tuna landed, including Michael Aviani’s 220 lb., Miguel Angeles with a 234 lb. tuna and Walter Korbler with a 221 lb fish, all of these taken off of the Gordo Banks.
Targeting the larger sized tuna required lots of patience and stockpiling larger quantities of bait, sardinas, squid and chunks of skipjack were all used, the majority of the largest tuna were hooked on either chunk of skipjack or strips of squid. There were also nice sized tuna to over 100 lb. landed while fishing the San Luis Bank, though that was tough through much of the week due to north winds, no big numbers of these larger fish, but some anglers did account for one, two and even three in one morning. Winds are contributed to currents pushing in greenish Pacific water. Most common sized tuna being caught were more in the 7 to 15 lb. class, these hit mostly of the sardinas, with Iman Bank and Palmilla Point being hot spot on particular days.
Dorado were much more scattered than the tuna, limited numbers of these fish were accounted for, more juvenile sized, an occasional fish to 15 lb. This is traditionally the peak time for targeting wahoo, so far the action has been random, not consistent day to day, but for anglers specifically targeting these gamefish, they were having multiple chances and landed as many as four per boat, though most felt fortunate having one wahoo in the fish box. They were hitting on both trolled lures, such as Rapalas and also on trap hooked baits, caballito and chihuil. With the water temperature still holding warm, we expect to have wahoo in the area through next month as well. Heavy pressure recently and wahoo can prove to be one species that becomes more elusive when large congregations of boats are zooming around there preferred feeding grounds.
Not much going off the bottom now, or close to shore, that usually picks up as water temperatures drop some. A few sierra were caught this past week, also miscellaneous pargo, snapper, but more triggerfish than anything else.
The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 270 charters for the week, with anglers reporting a fish count of: 2 black marlin, 58 wahoo, 14 sierra, 920 yellowfin tuna, 72 dorado, 3 amberjack, 1 yellowtail, 14 yellow snapper, 18 huachinango, 22 Eastern Pacific bonito, 65 white skipjack, 13 cabrilla, 3 barred pargo and 140 triggerfish.
Good fishing, Eric