GORDO BANKS PANGAS
October 26th, 2025
The Bisbee’s tournaments are officially done, and our captains are desperately waiting for the Tuna Jackpot tournament on November 6th. Unfortunately, none of our captains brought any fish to the scales this past Bisbee’s. Most of the blues and blacks they caught were in the range of 200-250 pounds. In fact, most of the marlin in this tournament were not qualifying fish. Congratulations to team Magic Touch on taking home $2.4 million. This team landed a 344-pound blue on Thursday and a 459-pound blue (heaviest of the tournament) on Friday.
Because of this tournament, our marina in San Jose was a ghost town Wednesday through Friday; we only had a couple charters per day (very unusual for our busiest time of the year). Because most of the bait guys focused on the big tournament boats, our live sardine supply was also low. We only had a couple of bait guys distributing to the pangas. We are hoping to see the bait situation back to normal next week.
Early in the week, our fleet focused on Vinorama and San Luis area. We saw a consistent tuna bite, though some days big skipjack schools would take over the area. Most of the yellowfin we caught were on the smaller side, between 5 and 10 pounds. We did see 5 tuna in the range of 45 to 80 pounds coming from this area. For bait, live/dead sardines and strips of squid were the go-to. We also saw a few small dorado in the mix. We only saw a handful of wahoo at the fillet table this week. We had boats specifically try for wahoo, though most of them were not successful. On Wednesday, one boat did land 3 wahoo covering the grounds from Vinorama to 25 (no other boats caught wahoo this day).
On Wednesday and Thursday, we noticed the tuna bite slow down significantly at Vinorama and San Luis. Many tournament boats were trying to catch small yellowfin to troll for big marlin. At one point, some captains reported upwards of 40 boats at the Vinorama area. Because of this, many boats started fishing Iman. The tuna bite slowed down towards the end of the week as we were only seeing 2 to 5 per boat this Saturday and Sunday.
Some boats were able to salvage their day by landing one or two dogtooth snapper. They used chunks of skipjack for bait. The current was a bit tricky this week as some days the bait would go straight down and others, the current made it impossible to drift efficiently. One boat landed a 25-pound rainbow runner while slow trolling a live bulito. This was quite the surprise as we tend to see rainbows under 5 pounds in our area.
Good Fishing, Brian
