CATCHING THE BLUES : Fishermen in Cabo San Lucas Waters Are Enjoying a Banner Run of Marlin

Conditions looked good last Friday when Rob McGregor motored his 54-foot sportfisher, Scrambler, out of Cabo San Lucas Harbor at the tip of Baja California.

The weather was clear and windless, and fishermen on both the hotel boat fleet and private boats had been catching billfish in recent days.

At 10 a.m., while McGregor was trolling less than 10 miles from the cape rocks, a blue marlin impaled its jaw on one of his lures. About an hour later, he caught a second blue. Then there was a third . . . and a fourth. Sandwiched in there somewhere was a striped marlin, giving McGregor, by himself, a billfish quintuple, an almost unheard of feat.

“I never saw anything like it, and I’ve been fishing out of Cabo San Lucas for 19 years,” he said. “I knew the fishing was good, because all the other boats were doing well.

“All of the blues I caught and released were between 200 and 400 pounds, and I caught them all between 1 1/2 to 12 miles off the cape rocks. The striper was 160 to 180. Two other private boats on Friday had triples. Talking to people later, I knew of 16 private boats that caught about 30 blues, and the hotel boats accounted for about another 30.”

McGregor, of West Covina, said fishermen recorded a banner August and September on blues, the bigger, stronger cousins of the more commonly caught striped marlin.

“On the way down to Cabo from San Diego, I caught a 415-pounder, about 75 miles above the cape. So I knew some big blues were still around.”

Another fisherman recently returned from Cabo San Lucas, Johnnie Crean of San Juan Capistrano, said last week’s blue marlin fishing at the cape ranks only with the epic month of May 1984, at Rancho Buena Vista, a marlin fishing resort about 80 miles east of Cabo San Lucas.

“I was at Rancho Buena Vista for two weeks in May of ’84 and averaged four to five strikes a day,” he said. “At Cabo last week, some boats had 10-strike days. Ten strikes a day on blue marlin--that’s unheard of, anywhere.”

J.D. Doughty of Bisbee’s Sportfishing Headquarters in Newport Beach monitors radio traffic between Newport Beach and Cabo San Lucas boats. He reports billfishermen at Cabo are experiencing a run of blues in which the fish are both abundant and big.

“The C-Bandit out of San Diego had three blues this week that went 500, 300 and 275 pounds,” he said. “The Xiphias, out of Newport, had six blues this week, all between 200 and 400. The Toby Sea out of San Diego had a 547-pound blue.

“The people I’ve talked to are talking about 5 to 10 strikes on blues a day. I had an unconfirmed report that one of the hotel boats had a 640-pound black marlin in 20 fathoms of water just off the Finisterra Hotel.

“The guys on the Tiolee out of Newport went out one day just to fish for dorado and wahoo and ended up with lots of those . . . and two 400-pound blues.”

The banner run of blue marlin fishing was interrupted early this week by Hurricane Roslyn, which swept by south of the cape Wednesday. The resulting wind and rain kept some boats in port, and others traveled to La Paz or Magdalena Bay for refuge. If past events hold to form, Doughty said, the fishing could be even better shortly.

“Chubascos (hurricanes) usually create unsettled water conditions for several days, but warm water usually follows a chubasco and that brings in more marlin and tuna,” he said.

Fishing conditions at the cape lately have been so good that McGregor said fishermen who were fishing with light to medium tackle risked losing a chance to bring in a trophy blue marlin.

“My theory is that when there are a lot of big blues around down there, most guys are under-tackled, fishing with 30- to 50-pound test line and small reels,” he said. “A thousand-pound blue can strip light line off a small reel very quickly. The hotel boats, for example, are almost always under-tackled.

“When I was down there, I was trolling with three 130 (-pound test) rigs and two 80s.”

Crean maintains that the catch-to-strike ratio on marlin indicates how serious marlin are on a given day about feeding.

“When you have a lot of marlin in the water and a lot of people are getting a lot of strikes and not bringing them in, that tells you the fish are slapping at the lures with their bills and not feeding aggressively,” he said. “On a day when strikes and catches are pretty even, then you know the marlin aren’t fooling around.”

McGregor points out many Cabo San Lucas marlin fishermen at this time of year have to bear a big, added expense--boat insurance.

Because of hurricanes, insurance carriers in many cases restrict boat owners from having their boats at the cape. Several years ago, in December, a sudden windstorm blew two dozen sailboats at Cabo San Lucas onto the beach at the harbor entrance, wrecking nearly all of them. Some were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Some carriers won’t allow you to have your boat at all in Cabo San Lucas between June 1 and Nov. 1 because of the hurricane season,” he said. “Others restrict you to between June 15 through Oct. 15. For a lot of boat owners, if they want to be down there during their restricted periods, they have to pay an added premium.”

Meanwhile, recent signs this week indicated that blue marlin were still around the greater cape area.

Said Doughty: “I talked to some people on boats returning to the cape from La Paz (late Wednesday) and they were getting blue marlin strikes off Rancho Buena Vista.”