August 21, 2022  

Light crowds of anglers now, enjoying a quiet period with no tropical storms threatening, quite a bit of cloud cover this past week, with cooling afternoon breeze, perfect time to visit, with main highlight being the quality sized yellowfin tuna near the Iman Bank. No new storms at this time, of course the next four weeks are historically the time frame with the highest percentage of being impacted by hurricanes. We all have our fingers crossed, following the forecast closely.

Anglers are now using caballito, ballyhoo, sardinas and slabs of squid for bait. Just this past week the yellowfin tuna have begun to prefer the stripped squid over sardinas. Problem with schooling needlefish aggressively stealing the sardinas as quickly as you set your drift. Ocean water temperature dropped a few degrees this past week, as on and off south winds pushed in different currents. Water was now in the 82 to 86 degree range, warmest spots in the direction of Los Frailes.

With the cooler water we saw a few more wahoo being landed this past week, striking mainly on trolled rapalas, weights were up to 40 lb. Still no big numbers, but a couple charters landed as many as three wahoo in a morning. not many boats were strictly looking for wahoo, as the majority were putting in most of their time trying for the tuna.The yellowfin tuna were mainly concentrated on the Iman Bank now, sizes from 40 to 160 lb. were brought in this past week. Average fish in the 50 to 70 lb. class. Bite was sporadic, lots of patience and persistence needed. Also fairly heavy pressure since this was the first tuna action seen locally for quite a while and was the main action going on at this time.

Not as many dorado now, and the majority of the fish we saw were under ten pounds, only a handful of larger bulls seen, unlike the previous month where we saw significant catches on bulls of 40 to 50 plus lb.
Not much found off the bottom now, more triggerfish or various species of sharks, though there were a few nice dogtooth snapper hooked into on the same grounds where the tuna were, time of year when these largest of snapper love from near shore to offshore structure.

Not much going on with billfish either, again not many anglers have actually been targeting them. We did see a few striped marlin and sailfish. This is always the time frame when the big black and blue marlin move in on the local seamounts, normally we would see the football sized tuna showing up on these same grounds, which is a favorite food source for these larger pelagics. Everything seems to be running late this year, so hopefully this month we will see some more baitfish activity to attract the largest of gamefish.

Good Fishing, Eric