Santa Rosalia, Mexico:
Beautiful Calm Fishing Waters All Week Long

Sept. 24, 2005, Mike Kanzler, Isla San Marcos, Santa Rosalia fishing, Baja California Sur, Mexico:

Things took a late-week turn for the better, with fair fishing and perfect weather in the Santa Rosalia fishing area.

Santa Rosalia had just beautiful calm seas the whole week, with still high temperatures, but low humidity. Air temperatures were in the mid 70s during the morning hours, with 90s during the daylight hours. There was little to no wind present, from the northwest and flat seas. Water temperatures are still very hot at 84-86 degrees at Santa Rosalia, with visibility around inshore and San Marcos island at 20-30 feet with greenish in color, offshore visibility 40-60 feet and blue.

With Autumn upon us, people are already starting to return to the Santa Rosalia area. Part time residents Jim and Marika Anderson, as well Bill and Julie Westendorff, and even the lagoon side crew of Wink, Uncle Bob and their wives, have retuned for the fall and winter season. It's great to have some people back on the fishing water around here. It's been kind of lonely these last few months and in the next few weeks more part timers will be showing up.

I even had a sportfishing charter this week, the first one in some time.

Before I took my charter, I did fish on my birthday Sept. 20th. Not going with my regular bait making plan of making going 5 extra miles to the Santa Rosalia marina for bait, I decided to try the San Lucas cove area.

The time spent running around to different spots looking for bait and NOT getting them was a total bust and it would have made all the difference going an extra 5 miles and catch all the bait you'd ever need without moving and before it even gets light out, putting you on the fishing grounds before sunrise. Never again! It was kind of hard to figure out whether or not any fish were on the bajos. With only 3 baits in the tank and with no iron strikes I will never know.

But yesterday I fished with George and Carol Wade of Orange, Calif. We started with a 5:00 pickup at the trailer park and, yes, made the run up to Santa Rosalia marina entrance for bait. We made 30 pieces in about 20 minutes.

Still dark, we ran for Tortuga island and got there just a little after sunrise.

The rule of thumb is when you are on the fishing grounds at this time it assures one of not missing any early bites. The first plan of the fishing morning was to try and catch some dinner fish and then later in the morning take advantage of all the sailfish that I saw out there last week.

We made few drops at known grouper and yellowtail spots and picked up two really nice sawtail grouper of 17-25 plus pounds! There's dinner in the box.

No yellows seemed to be around, so with the arrival of Wild Bill and Julie along with the Moosea boat of Jim and Marika which was already slow trolling live bigeyes for sails, we decided to follow suit.

It took about 15 minutes and had a double take, hooking one sail and missing the other! The hooked fish was battled to boat side and released in great shape by Carol Wade.

Back on the slow troll, another 15 minutes go by, and both rods go off. The sailfish are in abundance out there with about a 5 fish an hour ratio. Hard to beat that. We fished about 2 hours with three released fish, some missed strikes and few jumped off.

After that we decided to troll a few miles off the island for a chance of dorado on small jet heads and we picked up a few small eaters and released a few too.

All in all a good day of fishing and with the Santa Rosalia fishing season changing fast, things will only get better. Yellowtail should be coming soon.

I will be making a special long range trip to the remote Isla San Pedro Martir in the following weeks, most likely during early October and I will inform.

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