August 16, 2014
Anglers

Light crowds of visitors this past week, as many families are now busy preparing for the start of fall school semesters. Another factor for the limited crowds of anglers is that Southern California is now enjoying an epic El Nino season, where they are catching yellowfin and bluefin tuna, dorado and yellowtail, all in local waters. Weather patterns in Southern Baja continues to be unpredictable, forecasts have called for scattered thundershowers for much of the past two weeks, most of this activity has been over the mountain regions in the afternoon and not on the coastline, though there were isolated heavy showers over the coastal stretches as well. Ocean conditions have varied from day to day, swirling seas with increased swells, breezes from the north, east and south, then the next day would be calm. Charter fleets were able to launch every day, though on certain days it was wise to stay in closer proximately in case the weather turned unfavorable. There is a newly formed Tropical Storm Karina, now heading westward and far away from having any impact on land.

Ocean temperatures ranged from 82 to 88 degrees through most of the area, clean blue water was found within one mile of shore, lots of schooling skipjack now on the fishing grounds, sardinas are now being netted from the Puerto Los Cabos Marina Jetty area, very small in size. This has been the bait of choice for enticing the schooling football sized yellowfin tuna off of Palmilla Point, the tuna are also now found schooling off of Punta Gorda and La Fortuna, the key is obtaining the sardinas, this is a limited resource that really needs to see Government restrictions enforced in order to maintain a sustainable fishery.

This week local San Jose del Cabo fleets found action close by, with Palmilla Point being one of the more productive spots, anglers were fly lining live sardinas for yellowfin tuna in the 6 to 14 lb. class., some days there were quite a few skipjack to deal with, other times smaller sized schools of dorado would appear and to keep things interesting there were chances at hooking into a wahoo, striped marlin of sailfish. Hard to predict the exact time of day that this inshore action would be best, one morning it would be very early when the fish were most active, then the very next day they would not get going until 11 a.m., who’s to figure why?, current, tides, barometer, full moon, a lot of factors involved.

The Gordo Banks is starting to come alive, with cow sized yellowfin tuna making an appearance, but not in the biting mood yet, another grade of tuna in the 40 to 60 lb. range was also holding on these grounds and several of these were landed, early in the day striking on chunked skipjack or sardinas for bait. A handful of wahoo strikes off of these banks as well and at times the dogtooth snapper were in the mix. These grounds are coming alive, anything could happen on any given day. A black marlin estimated to be in the 450 lb. range was battled for two hours from a local panga, only to have the hook pull free as the fish was near the boat.
The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 69 charters for this past week, with anglers accounting for a fish count of:
2 striped marlin, 8 sailfish, 320 yellowfin tuna, 5 cabrilla, 8 jack crevalle, 66 dorado, 7 wahoo, 12 dogtooth snapper, 18 red snapper, 150 skipjack and 6 roosterfish.

Good fishing, Eric