July 13, 2008
Anglers –
The month of July is shaping up to be very tropical, still plenty of warm sunshine, lots of cloud cover, threatening rain squalls and high humidity. There was another threat of a storm system developing, named depression number 5, though as it appeared to be gaining strength and heading in the direction of the Baja Peninsula it quickly changed course and dissipated over the mainland. So at this time there are no tropical storm on the horizon, but it is also the time of year where conditions are hard to predict more than a couple of days ahead of time. With the disturbances to the south the local ocean conditions have been churned up, particularly on Tuesday, since then seas are settling down and offshore fishing conditions north of Punta Gorda were showing promising signs of activity. Water temperatures ranged from 74 to 80 degrees, with the warmer and cleanest areas being found off of Desteladera to Los Frailes.
There has been a wide variety of fish being found, but none of them have been exceptionally numerous at his time. Offshore catches have including striped marlin, blue marlin, dorado and yellowfin tuna. Bottom structure and inshore fishing produced amberjack, various pargo and snappers, pompano, bonito, jack crevalle, sierra and roosterfish. The past couple of days there were very favorable reports coming from areas offshore of Desteladera, this is where water temperatures were close to 80 degrees and clean blue water was being found, along with schools of flying fish. Anglers trolling lures accounted for billfish, tuna and dorado. Several blue marlin were hooked into, ranging to over 300 pounds. The dorado that were found in this area were very good sized, many of them over 40 pounds. Yellowfin tuna was hit or miss, but were found mixed in with schools of porpoise, this action occurred most of the time 10 miles or more from shore and the majority of the yellowfin found averaged 10 to 20 pounds.
Strong currents were running closer to shore and this seemed to be a factor in slowing down the action for bottom and inshore species. Though despite there not being big numbers there were some quality fish being accounted for. Trolling or drift fishing with either sardinas or mullet proved effective and working yo-yo style iron jigs off of rock piles in water depths of 120 to 180 feet also produced action. Dogtooth snapper to over 40 pounds were landed, amberjack ranging from 10 to 50 pounds and roosterfish averaged 5 to 10 pounds, though every day you would hear of at least a couple of much larger fish of 40 to 60 pounds being caught. Pompano, sierra and several other varieties of snappers were rounding out the inshore action. We anticipate offshore conditions to continue to improve and once this existing current slows we do expect to have better all around counts to report.
The combined panga fleets launching from the La Playita/Puerto Los Cabos area reported sending out approximately 67 charters for the past week and anglers reported a fish count of: 1 blue marlin, 8 striped marlin, 12 dorado, 13 yellowfin tuna, 34 bonito, 27 amberjack, 23 dogtooth snapper, 66 yellow snapper, 39 huachinango, 37 pompano, 48 sierra, 26 jack crevalle and 96 roosterfish.
Good Fishing, Eric
