November 9, 2019

Anglers –

Another busy week in Los Cabos, as hundreds of anglers arriving from across the globe to participate in the annual WON Tuna Jackpot. This year’s event attracted some 154 teams, with prize money of over one million dollars up for grabs. For yet another year the top first place honors went to a local San Jose del Cabo, La Playa team, this year is was the Sirena team which won with a monster 345 lb. yellowfin tuna, third largest ever weighed for this tournament, congratulations to this group of professionals.

There was more north wind this week, this resulted in choppy ocean conditions, particularly on the grounds north of Punta Gorda where most local charters have concentrated efforts. Daytime highs reached 90 degrees and ocean temperatures were averaging in the 80 to 83 degree range, slightly warmer on the Pacific that in the direction of Seas or Cortez. Various bait options included caballito, ballyhoo, few sardinas found, slabs of squid, small skipjack and chihuil.

Through the past week now the action for tuna which was previously found on San Luis Bank came to a standstill, only later in the week were a handful of free feeding yellowfin even spotted, the tuna found during the two day WON event were outside of Cabo San Lucas and on the Pacific grounds, nothing found on the Gordo Banks.

Highlight this week was the wahoo being found north near Vinorama, most of the fish landed were on slow trolled baits, mainly on caballito, since chihuil were now hard to obtain. Numbers of wahoo were limited, but they were more common than dorado, tuna or any other gamefish being found. Size of most wahoo we saw were in the 20 to 35 lb. class, largest we weighed in was 43 lb. The overall catch this week was way down, anglers were fortunate to land a wahoo and did really week if they caught two.

Only limited bottom action reported, even though the strong current finally slacked, then the wind picked up and made this a more difficult option. A few nice barred pargo, leopard group were accounted for, but more triggerfish than anything else.

Inshore there were good numbers of small roosterfish taken and with sardinas being scarcer we did not seeing more than a few sierra.

Billfish action was more toward the Pacific now, but we did see a handful of striped marlin and one blue marlin out of San Joe del Cabo, found in the direction of the Cabo San Lucas. Also more dorado found that way, though dorado were vey scattered and most of them were under 15 lb.

A few early season whales were reported, in the next month we expect more of these mammals arriving on their southern migration

The combined sportfishing fleet launching out of the panga area from Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out an estimated 140 charters for the week and anglers reported an approximate fish count of: 2 blue marlin, 6 striped marlin, 13 dorado, 1 yellowfin tuna, 43 wahoo, 6 yellow snapper, 8 barred pargo, 1 bigeye jack, 1 amberjack, 4 leopard grouper, 12 Mexican bonito, 8 yellow snapper, 2 sierra, 32 roosterfish and 35 triggerfish.

Good Fishing, Eric