September 7, 2013
Anglers –

Southern Baja has recently experienced a series of tropical storm systems, in the past couple of weeks the area has felt the effects from Ivo, Juliette, Kiko and this Thursday, TS Lorena. Lorena was a minimal strength tropical storm, but nevertheless when making direct impact, can make a mess of things in a hurry. We expect to see red flag closed port conditions through Friday and most likely part of Saturday, likely that sportfishing fleets will be back in operation for Sunday.

These back to back storms have repeatedly stirred ocean conditions, just as patterns seem to stabilize, another system develops, creating stormy offshore conditions, strong currents have been rampant, pushing around dirty water, particularly near shore, baitfish become more scattered as well. Then as the weather settles this cycle can rapidly reverse, fishing action can get back on track in a matter of a day or two.

Just like the weather has been rapidly changing, so has the all around fishing action. For the fleets launching out of Puerto Los Cabos Marina the most consistent bite has been for yellowfin tuna and dorado in the area of San Luis and Vinorama. Fresh squid has been available from the commercial fleets, actually these smaller sized giant squid are now being caught in local waters during the dark of night. Using strips of these squid was producing great action for the smaller sized football yellowfin. Same for dorado, they were hitting on squid, as well as caballito and a wide variety of trolled lures. The majority of the dorado were juvenile sized, these fish should be carefully released, a handful of larger respectable sized dorado to 10 or 20 pounds were accounted for. Anglers found fast action, though most of the fish were not large sized as is anticipated during late summer.

The larger cow sized yellowfin have been taking up residence on the Gordo Banks, just starting to arrive the last couple of weeks. No big numbers of these fish are being reported, but there have been around a half of dozen cows (yellowfin tuna 200 lb. or larger) landed landed from local boats. Recent trend has been an afternoon bite, during the early hours the current perhaps has been just too strong and the tuna have been more actively feeding later in the day when the current was slackening. Hard to figure their feeding patterns, this was a scenario that occurred last September and October as well, mainly local anglers capitalizing, charter boats regularly depart early in the morning and return early afternoon.

Options for anglers were somewhat limited, surface trolling baits or lures and also drift fishing over high spots. Strong currents made any deeper bottom fishing more difficult and it was not very productive even when able to reach the depths, the fish do not like fighting the swift currents either. A few red snapper were in the mix, an occasional amberjack or dogtooth snapper, but not many numbers. We expect that once currents do reside that we will find better results off of the structure.

Billfish bite slowed through the recent storm fronts, as weather settles we anticipate improved action for all of the sought after gamefish.

The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 41 charters for the week, with anglers reporting a fish count of: 3 striped marlin, 4 sailfish, 180 yellowfin tuna, 192 dorado, 2 wahoo, 3 amberjack and
15 huachinango (red snapper).

Good fishing, Eric