GORDO BANKS PANGAS
November 9th, 2025
The annual largest tournaments are now over, though the busy fall season continues. For us, this was one of the most productive weeks of the year, so far. Great action and great weather, plus whales are starting to show in our fishing grounds.
We have had a great run on wahoo for the last 2 weeks. We did not see consistent action like this last year. We are hoping that the hot wahoo bite continues throughout the rest of November and December. Most of our captains are trolling X-Raps, DTXs, and rigged ballyhoo first thing in the morning and then transitioning into slow trolling live chiwilis, if we can catch them. Most days, we are seeing plenty of them. We are hand lining these baits and using tuna veins as our chum line. Throughout the week, many boats were coming in with 2-5 wahoo almost every day, while still losing many other strikes. On average, we are landing 30% of strikes. As you know, getting a good hook set on these wahoo is challenging due to their bony and scissor sharp mouths. One of our boats landed 10 wahoo on Wednesday; the captain reported losing at least another 15, all on live chiwlis. The most productive grounds for wahoo were Iman, La Fortuna and 25. Surprisingly, we did see more dorado this week, most of them in the 15–25-pound range. These dorado were caught on chiwili while looking for wahoo, a couple of them on ballyhoo.
While slow trolling chiwili for wahoo, a handful of 40-50 pound tuna were also caught in the same area, though there was not much tuna action to report at Iman. Earlier in the week, we did see the small football tunas come up, though the live sardine supply was limited. Around mid-week, we did not have any live sardines available; we mostly used squid and dead sardines. Even though Iman’s tuna bite was hit or miss, we did get a few nice tuna while drifting dead sardines and squid. The better tuna bite came from Inner and Outer Gordo.
The Tuna Jackpot tournament on Thursday and Friday definitely added extra pressure as many boats concentrated in the areas of both Gordos. Many of our captains participated in this tournament. Congratulations to team North Star with Captain Romelio (our local bait guy) for winning first place with a 253-pound yellowfin. Captain Chuy and Jerry had the third heaviest tuna at 190 pounds, though they were knocked out of the big prices as the winning teams were in all jackpots. These big tuna came from both Gordos. Most teams reported landing a handful of tuna, though most of them were under the 120-pound mark. Same situation with targeting wahoo; most teams were able to land them each day of the tournament, though they were in the 30–40-pound range.
Good Fishing, Brian
