A little better weather today, so a little better story. The bay still has some Dungeness in it although they are still aren't distributed evenly. You need to work the right spot to get them, and the right spots tend to move around. On average, the channel near steel marker #5 is pretty hard to beat if the current isn't ripping. The pier is still producing crab, and it is still producing more crab for some than others. Randy from Carson City is here, so if you do come to crab on the pier in the next few days, at least you can watch someone else catch a few. It was nice enough for at least one boat to run down to Ten Mile and drop some pots. On the way back they saw a white shipping container (Conex box) washed up behind Bird Rock. It could be some of the tsunami debris, but it probably just washed off a local ship.

There have been some decent crab numbers from the pier in the last week. On a couple of different days some crabbers had a dozen keepers by noonish. The best action is around slack tide, as usual. I don't have any boat reports. No word on the surf fishing, either, but it looks to be kind of brackish with all the runoff lately and probably not too good for catching.

The weather is doing a pretty good job of keeping the boats off the water. Gusts to 35 knots and seas over 20 feet high will do that. The pier is still kicking out a few crabs for those that don't mind standing out in the rain. A couple of fellows this morning caught 9 Dungeness by 10:30 or so, then decided they were wet enough and left. The folks that came after didn't do as well. The last few days have seen a few guys getting half-limits from the pier. Some of the others haven't done as well, but such is fishing.

One fellow on the pier had 4 Dungeness before 11:00 this morning. Everyone else was playing catch-up until the divers showed up. They did well by freediving under the pier for their crab. For future divers, I recommend diving a little further afield. Don't dive where someone may think that you are taking crab from their gear. It doesn't matter if you are or not; appearances are everything. Nothing happened today, mostly because the crabbers on the pier were cool. They aren't always cool. It's probably good that I wasn't crabbing from the pier because I'm kind of a petty and vindictive. In a world in which loitering with your boat near someone else's crab pots can get you thought of as a pirate, diving near someone's net for crab could easily be misinterpreted.

Far more reds than Dungeness caught this weekend on the pier and in the bay. Except for one guy there were only a couple of Dungeness landed. The one guy caught 12 nice ones in three pots from the pier. The one fisherman I spoke with that had pots in the outer bay said that he had mostly female Dungeness in his pots. He declared crabbing "over", but I think that there may be a few keepers left out there.

The crabbing is decent in the bay when the current is moving slow. Unfortunately, with the high tides this week, the currents have been moving pretty fast most of the day. The best times to crab this weekend would be around noon tomorrow and around 1:00 PM on Sunday. By an hour or two after the tide the current is ripping out of the bay. The pier even had some nice Dungeness this week during the slack tides.

The report for this weekend: Slowish inside the bay for Dungeness with reds making the vast majority of the catch for most. Those in the know with their "secret spots" still did OK. The outer bay did much better than the inner for those that ventured out. I went down to Ten Mile on Saturday for limits of rock fish and half limits of Dungeness. The reefs off of the 38 06 line had lots of fish in 140 feet of water but no lings. We dropped 8 pots off of Ten Mile in 60 feet of water from the Towers to the 08.25 line with these numbers in the pots after 3 hours (from south to north): 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 3, 0, 7. The commercial gear that I saw was all south of Abbots Lagoon in 90 feet of water or deeper. I saw squid sign at the Keyholes but no catchable squid.

Not too much for me to report. One boat ventured out of the bay for limits of crab in the outer bay. A couple guys filled a 40 quart ice chest with crab in two days off of the pier. Ten of those crabs were Dungeness. There's a decent forecast for the weekend, no rain at least. I'm thinking of heading down to the beach for crab and rockfish and maybe a few squid if they're still around on Sunday. I hope I see a few of you out there. Just a few, though.

There was a bit of crabbing going on between the storms. Trevor commented on the previous post that on Saturday he caught 18 crab up to 7" in 7 pots soaking for 90 minutes. That is definitely worthy. There was a limit of crab caught off the pier yesterday morning during the final part of the storm. There were five keepers in one pot pulled after the overnight soak on Friday morning. The catching is surely better on the pier when you aren't competing with 100 other crabbers. If there is ever a good time for fishing for sturgeon in Tomales Bay, this would be it. The water is brown with runoff and should have chased most of the bat rays out of the shallows. Remember, I said most.