September 17, 2017 
Now in the final weeks of the summer season, we are seeing lighter crowds of tourists, as families are now getting settled into the start of the new Fall School semester. This is now peak time for tropical storms to develop and potentially strike the Los Cabos area, this week is the three year anniversary of the incredibly destructive Hurricane Odile. Two weeks ago we felt the impact of a direct hit by TS Lidia, clean up and rebuilding is an ongoing process. This week we have been following three separate tropical systems off to the south of Southern Baja, Hurricane Max is now dissipating as it made landfall in Southern Mexico, the other low pressure area off to the west is not doing much, weakening and is circling far away from land. The storm we are now carefully watching is Tropical Storm Norma, forecast to reach category 1 hurricane status over the weekend. This system is presently moving very slowly and gaining strength, latest forecast has showed it veering further off the west, off of Todo Santos, but ii is unpredictable exactly what path Norma will follow. So precautious preparations are necessary, we are expecting storm surf surges to increase as large as 15 ft. to 20 ft. on Sunday, hopefully not too high of winds and surely we will have rainfall, hopefully nothing like the 27 plus inches we endured from TS Lidia.
Calm conditions prevailed this past week, light winds in the afternoons, mostly clear skies, very high humidity, slightly cooler temperatures at night, with daytime heat index averaging 100 degrees. Ocean water temperature has cooled slightly over the past couple of weeks, now averaging 84 to 86 degrees. Off colored greenish currents are swirling throughout the region, varied clarity in certain areas from day to day. Most of the floating debris from the storm wash out has now dissipated. The fishing has been on and off ever since the passing of Lidia, there were good numbers of dorado found, though the majority were juvenile sized, an occasional fish over 15 lb. Dorado were found in schools throughout the region while trolling medium sized lures. Also they world readily strike on a variety of bait.
Bait suppliers were able to find sardinas near shore early in the week and along with strips of squid, these were the main bait options available. We expect sardinas will not be obtainable over the weekend with high storm swells, but as those reside hopefully sardina supplies will return and remain steady. Yellowfin tuna were being found from the Gordo Banks and towards the Iman Bank, action was sporadic, from scratchy to wide open, depended a lot on clarity and currents that were running at a given time. Often the yellowfin tuna were seen boiling on the surface, but they proved to be finicky, some days biting right off the bat early, then slim pickings, coming back up late, hard to predict. Average size tuna was in the 10 to 15 lb. class, yellowfin tuna to over 50 lb. were accounted for, though numbers were limited. Reports of tuna to 100 lb. seen in the mix, though the larger grade of tuna have not been striking much. The majority of all tuna action was found while drift fishing with strips of squid or sardinas.
Only a handful of wahoo strikes reported, more of them lost than actually landed. We expect when the water temperatures cool off a bit more and we see cleaner blue water back close to shore, that wahoo activity will improve. Billfish were scattered, a few sailfish, striped, blue and black marlin hook ups reported, though we only had limited numbers of angler visiting now and most of these were preferring to target species such as tuna and dorado. No bottom or inshore action to really report on, besides a few red snapper and triggerfish.
The combined panga fleets launching out of La Playita, Puerto Los Cabos Marina sent out approximately 49 charters for the week, with anglers reporting a fish count of: 1 black marlin, 6 sailfish, 12 white skipjack, 155 dorado, 3 wahoo, 170 yellowfin tuna, 5 yellow snapper, 14 huachinango and 42 triggerfish.
Good fishing, Eric
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GORDO BANKS PANGAS
Eric Brictson / Operator
619 488-1859
Los Cabos (624) 142-1147
e-mail:gordobanks@yahoo.com
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