I just got back from a 5 day vacation in Cabo...man who said Mexico is hot?!? It was actually pretty chilly at night and even during the day, the wind still made things a little cool if you were just coming out of the water. It was my first trip to Mexico so I was a little surprised.
Anyhow, the trip overall was great and I did get a charter in too so that was awesome. Myself and 2 buddies went out on a boat called "Edith III", we booked it through the hotel so I was a little anxious. We all know how fishing is, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't but I felt pretty good as I had been tracking several other outfits and the tuna reports had been pretty consistent.
So we got down to the marina and met our captain - nice guy, good enuff gear and a nice 28 foot boat...everything seemed pretty good until I told him we wanted to head off shore for tuna and he seemed to have very little confidence in doing so. He made it sound like the fishing was spotty out there and considering you have to motor way the h**l out there to get tuna and you have miles and miles of ocean to fish, I thought we would follow his recommendation to stay closer in.
So we jigged and trolled for the entire morning 7am-11 without a single hit. We had trolled some hoochies, swim biats, and rapalla for about an hour and a half before we started jigging. The jigging kept us a little more entertained in that we weren't sitting back just stairing at rods waiting for a hit, but even the jigging was hard work! We were using the same short heavy trolling rods and they weren't the best equipment for that job. The jigs were 8oz and you would reef on em as hard as you could,reel in the slack and repeat. So it really was a lot of work compared to the vertical buzz bomb jigging I have done here in BC.
I was really starting to think we had made a bad choice (in charters). There was a bunch of radio activity so he picked up the gear once again and head back to "the Arch" and tied on some different looking jigs which were tipped with bait. This time we dropped em down and had a triple header virtually right away. I thought i had hit bottom until I felt a little resistance which then turned into a big run. As it turns out we (and the 100 other charter boats) had gone to this spot to catch Humbolts! Yup, 4-5 foot long giant squid! I would guess they were in the 50lb class maybe even more. It was apparent that there were probably hundreds of the things down there as every drop you would get one. As we hadn't hit anything all day the "action" was welcomed but became repetitive (ie boring) after hooking 6 or 7 each. They fought OK, they are powerful animals but it was essentially just a big tug of war were you would gain 10 feet and he would jet and take 5...just back and forth like that from the bottom all the way up. I figure this is what the captains did on slow days...something to take a little heat off of them when their production was looking weak. Like I said, we had had our fill of that pretty quickly and asked to be taken elsewhere.
So back to the original spot with the original gear but this time when we came out of plane we saw 3 other boats with fish on so at least we felt pretty optimistic that our captain had finally found some fish! Action stayed hot for probably 60-90 minutes and during that time we hit maybe 15-20 yellowtails. They fought hard and were scrappy fish, this is what we had been looking for. we had a couple double headers and one triple so we certainly got our money's worth as the action was hot and heavy. It was so busy that i didn't get as many pics as I would have liked. Most fish we in the 7-10lb range with one lunker weighing in around 35! We were fishing 50lb main and I did manage to snap one off on a big run.
We had some colleagues in another boat offshore and they hit 4 yellow fin tuna and 1 dorado on a much longer off shore trip so all in all I think it was a good choice to stay inshore. After all the jigging, the squid, and 5+ yellow tails each, we were spent and called it a day an hour early!
I'll try and get some pics and a squid vid to rod later today!
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Topic: Cabo San Lucas March 2008 (Read 2593 times)