December 2, 2007
Anglers -
The start of the new month of December saw crowds of tourists lighten up, which is typical for the first couple of weeks of this month. After last weekend's cold windy front moved through, the start of this past week was nearly picture perfect, calm conditions, lots of sunshine and high temperatures into the 80s, then on Friday afternoon another front moved in from the southwest, this one brought some much needed rainfall fall on and off throughout the night, enough to cause dangerous driving conditions on the highway and minor flooding. Of course the rain also main a complete mess out of the freshly graded road to La Playita and Puerto Los Cabos, though by Saturday afternoon the heavy machinery had smoothed it out some.
The story for fishing out of the San Jose del Cabo area was that the yellowfin tuna bite has been absolutely wide open, from the Palmilla Point, Punta Gorda, La Fortuna to the Iman Bank. The action was found primarily on live sardinas, which have become scarce off of La Playita and are now concentrated off of Palmilla, but this bait has been well worth any waiting required and once obtained it took anglers only a short time to fill the fish boxes with limits and more of the yellowfin, which were averaging in sizes from 10 to 20 pounds. In fact the tuna were biting so aggressively that other species of fish could hardly compete, there were reports that anglers that were trolling with large belly strips of these same tuna in search of dorado could not keep the tuna from striking, same report for anglers trolling feathers or rapala type lures. Some dorado were accounted for, but only at about a one to twenty tuna ratio, the majority of these dorado were 15 pounds or less. Water temperatures are steadily dropping as we enter the winter season, now averaging from 74 to 76 degrees, with the warmer areas in the direction of the Sea of Cortez. The majority of the Cabo San Lucas fleet were traveling north to get in on the hot tuna action as the bite in recent days tapered off on the Pacific side of the peninsula where cooler and choppy conditions were encountered.
Since last week the wahoo bite basically came to a standstill, with only a few stray fish reported for the week, most of these from the La Fortuna area, other wahoo were seen free swimming through the chum lines but could not be enticed. A few more amberjack starting to show up in the fish counts, most of these fish were hooked on iron yo-yo jigs off of the same rocky structure where the schools of yellowfin tuna were holding. There were also a couple of days where some quality sized huachinango were found while soaking sardinas near the bottom, underneath the schools of tuna, these ranged up to 12 pounds and was really the first good bite seen for them so far this season.
Surf fishermen reported very good early morning action off of the local beaches where schools of baitfish were congregated for sierra up to 7 pounds and roosterfish to 15 pounds.
The combined panga fleets launching from La Playita sent out approximately 55 charters for the week, with anglers accounting for a fish count of: 3 wahoo, 24 sierra,62 pargo (huachinango / red snapper), 16 cabrilla,12 amberjack, 52 dorado, 64 bonito and 1,020 yellowfin tuna.
Good Fishing, Eric
