August 2, 2009
Anglers –
Light crowds of tourists actually had a slight break from the intense summer heat, as there was increased cloud cover and even some scattered light rain precipitation over the Southern Baja Peninsula. No new tropical storms systems have developed at this time, just local weather that pops up during the heat of the summer months. Ocean water conditions ranged from 82 to 86 degrees throughout most of the region, strong currents have been running rampant and have caused the water clarity close to shore to fluctuate accordingly. Anglers have found varying offshore conditions in recent days. Live bait options have consisted of sardinas, jurelito, caballito and mullet. There has continued to be large numbers of bolito and skipjack on the offshore fishing grounds, they were easiest to catch earlier in the day and proved to be a productive option for trolling for various gamefish.
The changing weather seeming to slow the overall fishing action down this past week, though there were some quality catches accounted for. The yellowfin tuna bite that had broken open offshore became less consistent, though tuna were still found moving with porpoise, though it became a scenario where the activity was being encountered further from shore and more often than not the tuna were not found eager to bite as the week before. Other yellowfin action was found closer to shore off of Santa Maria, blind strikes, no porpoise, these were smaller sized fish and would bite best early in the morning, so the first boats to the area seemed to account for the better numbers of tuna landed.
A few anglers who were persistent enough to stick with the harder effort of working the yo-yo jigs off of the rocky high spots did report some good action for grouper, amberjack, pargo and other species, though this was an exception rather than a rule, most anglers opted to keep moving in order stay as cool as possible, opting to slow troll bolito baits or troll higher speed lures for a chance at billfish, dorado or wahoo.
Charters were limited this week and less anglers were trying the spot off of Palmilla Point where the previous week reported such good action for species such as amberjack, grouper and dorado. The few anglers that did try this area reported only an average of a few fish in combination per morning, though the number s were not high, there was still a very good chance at hooking into larger fish.
Dorado numbers were down, but the scattered fish that were encountered were mostly in the 20 to 40 pound range, no particular hot spot, though trolling larger baits on the fishing grounds from the Gordo Banks to San Luis seemed to produce the larger percentage of these acrobatic gamefish.
The billfish action centered around the Gordo Banks to Chelino, a mix of sailfish, sluggish to bite striped marlin and a few more blue marlin now being hooked into. One 500 plus pound class blue marlin was reportedly landed off of a cruiser based out of Palmilla.
The combined panga fleets launching from the La Playita/Puerto Los Cabos area reported sending out approximately 44 charters for the past week, with anglers accounting for a fish count of: 5 sailfish, 4 striped marlin, 2 blue marlin, 22 yellowfin tuna, 23 dorado, 2 wahoo, 19 amberjack, 18 huachinango (snapper), 10 yellow snapper, 12 pompano, 15 bonito, 9 grouper, 11 hammerhead sharks, 16 jack crevalle and 23 roosterfish.
Good fishing, Eric
