Fishandhunt101

By Ed Kunze

Ranging from Peru to the state of Baja in Mexico, the roosterfish is one of the hardest fighting fish in the Eastern Pacific Ocean for the inshore species. A member of the jack family, by combining brute strength with a bad attitude, makes the rooster a world class game fish.
There are several ways to fish for Pez Gallo (Pez guy-yo), and most of them involve being on the back side of the breaking waves, which are crashing on the shoreline. The closer you can get to the breaking waves, the higher your probability of hooking up. Innovation, quality gear, and the ability of using multiple methods for catching these hard fighting fish should be on every serious rooster fisherman’s resume.
The methods to get a rooster are numerous. I have caught 6 roosters in one morning while fishing with Captain Margarito on the Gaby, a 30 foot cruiser. We were fishing conventional gear, with dead bait, rigged and trolled in the same manner you would for sailfish. These fish all averaged about 45 pounds, with the largest at about 52 pounds. But, the surf, being pushed by a tropical storm a 1,000 miles off the coast, was huge that day. It was a surfer’s dream come true.  However the surf was so strong, even the roosters were having a hard time with it, and chose to sit out in the 20 to 25 foot water; which is exactly where we were. Using a diving plane, we got the bait down to the middle of the water column, and scored big.