BAIT FISH VERY HEAVILY CONCENTRATED OVER
BANKS ON THE PACIFIC SIDE OF CABO SAN LUCAS

Jan. 16-22, 2006, George Landrum, Fly Hooker Sportfishing, Cabo San Lucas fishing, Mexico:

Cabo San Lucas daytime temperatures were in the low 80s to high 70s and our cool evenings in the mid 50s. While the first two days of the fishing week were choppy on the Pacific side, the rest of the week gave us great surface conditions on both sides of Cabo San Lucas.

At the end of the week our warm water to the immediate south was the warmest at mostly 73 degrees. Once you get a few miles up the coast in either direction the water cools off. On the Pacific side across the Golden Gate and San Jaime Banks the water is 66-68 degrees and farther to the north it warms back up to 69-71 degrees. On the Cortez side of Cabo San Lucas the cool side is 67-68 degrees. This cool water on the Cortez side is very green and off color.

Cooling water has brought down the number of large Marlin reported this past week, but there were still a few found. With the paucity of Blues around the concentrated effort this week was on Striped Marlin.

If you liked to fish in a parking lot, the Golden Gate Bank was the place to be as there was a very heavy concentration of bait on top of the Bank and with it, a very strong concentration of striped marlin between 70 and 120 pounds in size.

Elsewhere, the Marlin bite was not red hot, and a lot of Cabo San Lucas sportfishing boats saw no fish whatsoever.

I don't know what happened to the Tuna, but they were very scarce this week. A few fish were found to the south of the Lighthouse at 25 miles, and they were between 15 and 25 pounds, but there were no large numbers of fish caught.

I saw very few Dorado flags this week. The few fish I did hear of were in the 10-20 pound class and found due south in the warm water.

A few wahoo were caught this week, the best areas reported as the San Jaime bank and just off the shore at the lighthouse on the Pacific.

I got in a little personal inshore fishing action this week with an 18-boat Sierra tournament Saturday. We fished just south of the San Cristobal point and caught fish from 2 pounds to 8 pounds with the average being right around 7 pounds. My partner and I caught 6 Sierra and tied for the smallest fish at 1.8 pounds. The largest fish of the tournament was 10.8 pounds.

Also caught in the same area were Pargo to 20 pounds and grouper to 12 pounds.