Anglers - December 16, 2001 The weather pattern continued to be cool and cloudy through most of this past week, with daytime high temperatures barely reaching the mid 70's. The wind was prevalent from the northeast, but it was not as strong as the previous week and there were a couple of days when the breeze did lay down completely and left flat calm seas. For past couple of weeks the wind has been persistent and has created rough offshore conditions, which has had anglers searching for calmer waters, closer to shore. The crowds of tourists were moderate during this pre-Holiday period, but sportfishing fleets appeared to be keeping fairly busy, despite the unfavorable weather. Panga fleets out of La Playita accounted for a variety of medium sized fish, with the most common daily catches being yellowfin tuna, dorado, sierra, roosterfish, pargo, amberjack, skipjack, cabrilla and triggerfish. Supplies of sardinas continued to be abundant off the beach of La Playita, which made it very convenient for the pangas. The first part of the week there was a couple of very cold and slow fishing days, with average catches down to just a few small fish per boat and several boats not catching any fish at all, but over the weekend the action improved and average catches were up to a dozen fish per boat, with about half of them being yellowfin tuna in the 15 to 20 pound range. Iman Bank was where the best bite was found, with live sardinas producing the majority of the action. A handful of larger tuna to 50 pounds were also being hooked in this same area but were hard to land on the lighter 20 pound tackle that most anglers were using to have success on the increasingly line shy tuna. Water temperature was down a bit, to about 77 to 78 degrees and was greenish due to all of the recent wind, this made it tough to entice the blue water species like wahoo and dorado but a few of them were being reported. A few wahoo were taken in the area of Punta Gorda by anglers trolling rapala type lures, these were mostly by people in their own aluminum boats that were beach launching and trolling lures all morning long. Most of the panga anglers preferred to target the better all around action with the live bait. Dorado were scattered and only found in limited numbers, in recent days they were located close to shore, hitting best on bait and weighing 10 to 20 pounds. With the cooler water the fleets are now starting to target more bottomfish and have reported fair success on yo-yo style lures for grouper, cabrilla, pargo and amberjack, with most of these species weighing less than 20 pounds. Inshore fishing was showing signs of improvement, as sierra, jack crevalle and roosterfish provided good light tackle action, especially on live bait, but some anglers also had success on a variety of lures. Over the weekend there were good counts of roosterfish reported, most of them weighed under 10 pounds and were caught and released, there were several bigger ones to over twenty pounds accounted for. Several of the larger roosterfish were caught out in deeper water, which is unusual, but the inshore area of La Laguna was where the concentrations of them were. Good Fishing, Eric