Anglers –
September 17, 2016
As summer season now is entering its final week we continue to see light crowds of visitors, though our busy fall season will be upon us soon. We continue to follow weather forecast closely, this week there was Hurricane Orlene which headed far off to the west, making no impact at all on land, except for increasing the already high humidity. Now we are watching a newly forming low pressure system off of the mainland coast, they are forecasting this system to travel offshore, paralleling the west coast of Baja, far enough away to not cause any problems, hopefully this will be the case. Most of the area is now finishing up cleaning the debris and damage caused by Newton, though our local panga dock area will require more rebuilding than most areas, clean up has begun, but will be an ongoing process.
Ocean conditions are great now, practically no winds, light swells, clear blue water of about 85 degrees, lots of baitfish activity on the local fishing grounds. Anglers were fishing the spots from the Gordo Banks to San Luis, using strips of squid, some caballito, bolito, skipjack and chihuil for bait, finding a variety of species, but no great numbers of any particular fish at this time. Yellowfin tuna are being seen feeding and breezing on the surface, but with all of the natural food source available on the same grounds, they are tough to entice into striking. A handful of tuna in the 100 to 150 lb. class were accounted for and other yellowfin in the 10 to 60 lb. range, best bet has been on the Iman Bank, though the Gordo Banks is producing some fish as well. Most charters were fortunate to land one or two tuna in their overall catch.
Overall catches averaged a few fish per boat, tuna, dorado, snapper being the most common catch, a few billfish encountered as well. Large numbers of tuna are in the area, just a matter of them going on the bite, with so much food on the grounds, they are not that hungry to aggressively attack anglers offerings at this time, a lot can happen though from day to day, week to week.
Off the bottom there were yellow snapper, triggerfish, leopard grouper, barred pargo, amberjack and dogtooth snapper, though limited numbers, except for the triggerfish, which were plentiful as usual. Dorado were scattered, some fish up to 20 lb. landed. Wahoo were scarce, but one quality sized wahoo of 60 lb. was landed from a panga on Thursday on a lure near Punta Gorda.
The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 54 charters for the week, with anglers reporting a fish count of: 4 striped marlin, 57 yellowfin tuna, 17 dorado, 1 wahoo, 8 yellow snapper, 1 dogtooth snapper, 8 leopard grouper,55 triggerfish, 3 amberjack and 5 rainbow runner.
Good fishing, Eric