Tougher fishing this past week and I attribute it to several things. The lack of live bait doesn't make it easy. There is "some" live bait, but mostly, we were using a combination of some live bait with a bigger mix of dead frozen ballyhoo, chunked and stripped bonito as well as caballitos. They all worked, but not as well as live bait.


The bait situation is a bit dire to begin with, as I have often described. All of the Baja is hurting. Much of it is due to the cyclical "El Nino" situations we're experiencing with extremely warm waters hurting the bait stocks.


Secondly, I don't know what it was this week, but I can't remember when I've ever seen so many pangas on the water. We had several vans of our own full of fishermen each day , but it was just an incredibly busy week out there. Our competitors also had a van or two. Visiting guide services also had a van or two. There were alot of independent fishermen in their own boats. There were scores of commercial fishermen. There were alot of free diving spear fishermen in the water as well (not exactly the best mix when there are fishermen in the same areas as the divers!). It looked like a freeway out there!


Everyone needs bait. So, that meant that the bait was truly depleted. Additionally, so much traffic on the water didn't do the fishing any favors.


We only had a few wahoo hook-ups this week. The billfish bite wasn't as hearty although there were a few stripers hooked and one blue estimated at over 400 pounds . The rooster fish were a bit more scarce as well. About the only thing really going on were the tons of 3-5 pound "mini-dorado" all over the place. But that gets pretty old after awhile hooking trout-sized dorado!


So, maybe this upcoming week will be lighter and things will turn around. There were a few cabrilla and pargo in the mix and some large bonito.