All Dorado and No Bills

November 3, 2009

Sammy enjoyed catching dorado yesterday, but he loves catching marlin on the fly. Last year Sammy was down here in Cabo at the exact same time and had spectacular striped marlin fishing. Both the Pacific and Sea of Cortez were alive with bait balls and feeding predators. Bait balls are huge concentrations of baitfish, and around Cabo they usually consist of sardines. If you look at a bait ball underwater it looks like a tornado as literally thousands of baitfish huddle together for protection and swim rapidly in circles. Marlin, snappers, dorado, tuna or even the unusual Brutus whale to name a few will completely devour an entire bait ball in a very short time. Not a single sardine will survive!

This year is not the same. It’s apparent the full moon has things messed up and/or the fact that Hurricane Rick pushed the marlin and the bait balls out to sea two weeks ago. Like yesterday, Grant Hartman warned us that finding marlin would be tough, however we would go to a place where a few were seen yesterday. The location was not far out of sight of Cabo and by 8am we found ourselves dragging the hookless teasers. Everyone stared with anticipation just waiting to see an explosion in our wake with a slashing bill. But like yesterday, it was all about dorado. Today we landed several nice ones. For some reason they were actually finicky and would not take my normal first choice of a large popper. Instead they just looked at it and went crazy looking for our teasers again. The only fly we fooled them on was our striped marlin fly. Hey whatever works!

I’m pretty content banging up the dorado but would love to see us get a marlin. Sammy truly expected another year like last and he and Grant have discussed a new plan for tomorrow. It appears we will be leaving early and getting home late as we will travel far north and out into the Pacific.

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