GORDO BANKS PANGAS

August 2, 2020

Much of the same patterns this past week. Light crowds of tourists arriving, greeted by warm summer conditions, no new tropical storms that we see developing at this time. Windy conditions were dominant through the entire month of July, though this week winds finally settled down late in the week and through the weekend, giving a chance for water clarity to improve and ocean temperatures were once again on a warming trend, ranging from the mid to upper 70s.

Bait supplies mainly consisted of caballito, with some mullet still found as well, no sardinas were reported yet and usually we do not see them until closer to October. The majority of local sport fishing charters were fishing the grounds from the Gordo Banks and north to Vinorama. Finding a mix of inshore, bottom and offshore action. Most consistent action was found working the shallow rock piles and areas such as San Luis and Vinorama Banks, more often in depths of 100 to 180 ft., using yo-yo jigs and bait. Various cabrilla, grouper, snapper, pargo and amberjack were hooked into, though these fish had to be worked for, no easy big numbers at this time. No wahoo or dorado action was reported

We did hear of a few yellowfin tuna being hooked into near the San Luis Bank, on yo-yo jigs and bait, these tuna were in the 40 to 50 lb. class. We hope with conditions now stabilizing that this tuna action will become steadier, the month of August is normally one of the best times of the year to find good numbers of quality sized yellowfin tuna. Other private charters were going much further offshore in search of warmer clean blue water and migrating porpoise which in turn can be associated with schooling yellowfin, so far this action was very hit or miss, especially with how the wind had been and the distance which was needed to possibly find action. Normally this month is when we find the tuna closer to shore on the high spots, just taking a little longer to develop this summer with the way ocean conditions have been.

Along the shoreline anglers are still finding jack crevalle and some very nice sized roosterfish, we are now in the late time of the season for these fish, but since we have not seen a lot of huge storm surf activity this could last for another couple of weeks.

We did not have many anglers that wanted to go looking for billfish, it is kind of in between seasons now, as the striped marlin move out, following cooler currents towards the north and then we see the black and blue marlin show up, which is now the time frame when they usually become more prevalent on local grounds. We did see a handful of striped marlin landed this past week, most of these were in the 100 to 140 lb. range.

Light crowds, good fishing, Eric