Gordo Banks Pangas
San Jose del Cabo
September 7, 2008
Anglers '
Light crowds of tourists are now traveling to the Los Cabos area, this seems to be the case for late summer each season. The next several weeks is historically the time when more hurricanes have made impact on the Southern Baja Peninsula, everyone is just waiting to see what happens, would be nice to get some more rainfall, but without the association of high destructive winds. This past week there was Tropical Storm Karina that quickly developed and then dissipated just as fast in the area 250 miles southwest of Cabo San Lucas, it was just enough to keep the humidity at uncomfortable levels and create high stormy ocean conditions on Wednesday. Water temperatures are ranging from 80 to 85 degrees throughout most of the region, currents have been strong and there have been rapidly changed water clarity conditions. Fleets have been spread out searching for the best possible action, the bite seems to be changing daily, one day the fishing action would be very good at open spot and then the action would be dead in the same area the next day, while reports would come in that the bite was happening on some other spot. This had charter skippers shot gunning around from spot to spot.
The supplies of sardinas are becoming more scattered as they usual do during this time, the pangueros are finding sufficient amounts of the sardinas in the area of the Puerto Los Cabos Marina channel, but on some morning anglers had to wait up to twenty minutes to obtain them. The local panga fleets were fishing off of Palmilla point earlier in the week for good catches of dorado and yellowfin tuna, most of this activity was found by either slow trolling or drift fishing with live bait. Some days the skipjack were a nuisance and were hard to get through to catch the more preferred species, but on other days it was all dorado and tuna, no skipjack. Then this bite off of Palmilla shut down due to dirty currents and switched back towards Punta Gorda, La Fortuna and Iman. Same deal more yellowfin tuna and dorado, occasional sailfish mixed in. Most of the yellowfin were in the 8 to 20 pound range, same for the dorado, but there were a few exceptions of larger fish to over 30 pounds accounted for.
Not much bottom action this past week, stronger current made it tough to effectively work the rock piles. A handful of cabrilla, amberjack and pargo were caught by anglers using yo-yos and soaking baitfish. But more often than not it was the sakipjack that hit off of the rock piles, a lot of work to fight these fish just to release them since they are not good for eating.
We have heard of reports of a some blue marlin and striped marlin hook ups, but this action was spread out and more in the direction off of Cabo San Lucas, off of San Jose del Cabo it has been the few sailfish that are highlighting the billfish action, found close to shore in the same areas as the tuna and dorado.
The combined panga fleet launching from La Playita/Puerto Los Cabos sent out approximately 41 charters for the week, with anglers reporting a fish count of:
1 striped marlin, 4 hammerhead sharks, 9 sailfish, 132 dorado, 104 yellowfin tuna, 6 amberjack, 11 cabrilla, 19 pargo, 9 roosterfish, 4 rainbow runners and 22 triggerfish
Good Fishing, Eric
