Cabo san lucas
March 18th to March 24th, 2005

WEATHER CONDITIONS: Skies mostly sunny, daytime temps in the low 80’s, nighttime in the mid-60’s
AVERAGE WATER TEMP: 68F.
BEST LURES: Live bait.

BILLFISH
All things considered fishing was pretty decent this week. March, as known, is traditionally one of the slower marlin months, as we enter the transition from winter to spring and we have falling water temperatures. We thought colder water would produce the first swordfish of the year, but instead we got a blue marlin. The lucky boat was “Ruthless”, who not only had a blue, but two stripes, just outside of Santa Maria Bay on March 23rd – all three took live bait. Anglers were Fred Lange, Theodore Picard and Mary Kerry, all from Fairfax Station, VA. Although the catch aboard “Ruthless” was the exception, other boats did manage to find marlin here and there as well as a mixture of smaller game giving us a twenty percent success rate for billfish and an overall catch success rate for all species combined of seventy-seven percent. Weather was a bit up and down one day sunny and calm, the next cooler with seas on the rough side. Sven Ingstad, from Newport Beach, out on “Salsa” with friends, was able to bait five marlin and release three, which was better than average. March 23rd, proved to be the best day of the week, with over sixty percent of our boats catching marlin this one day, which is when most opted to fish the Cortez side between Land’s End and Santa Maria. Other notable catches were two striped marlin for “Yahoo” this same day, as well as a striped marlin, one wahoo and five dorado for “Valerie”. A couple of days before this, “Andrea” had a bonanza for the Andersen party from Minnesota, with one striped marlin released, four tunas, three dorado and one giant squid. Pisces anglers caught a total of 17 striped marlin and 1 blue marlin – all were released.

OTHER SPECIES:
Although we didn’t have the same quantities of yellowfin tuna as in previous weeks, they were still the most abundant species in the area. Forty four percent of anglers hooked up to tuna in the 10 to 30 lb class with catches per boat from one to nine fish, whilst others could catch as many as they wanted – many were released. Dorado came in second to tuna with thirty one percent of charters finding catches were one to five fish per boat and the odd boat here and there getting up to fifteen. Weights were from 10 to 27 lbs. It was nice to see an improvement on wahoo this week; some boats even had a couple apiece. Weights were from 40 to 75 lbs. Inshore quite a lot of sierra, amberjack, snapper and ladyfish.