Yes, crab season is now officially closed. Not only could eating the wrong crab kill you, but now wardens will ticket your corpse. Testing of the crab will continue and the season will reopen when the Department of Public Health and Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment agree that crabs pose no health risk. There is a hotline to call for updates, (831) 649-2883, and a website to check, CDFW website. As you may have guessed, I will be sure to post something on here when the all-clear siren sounds. The water temperature here has dropped dramatically, which is bad for halibut, sea bass and tuna, but, if it is true that the warm water caused this mess with the crabs, maybe it's good for the Dungeness. The 61º water out front is now 56º. My cousin is a commercial crabber and a pessimist, but he thinks that we may see the crabbing opened up here in the next month. Usually he's full of doom and gloom, so who knows?
 

     At least the rockfish don't care too much about water temps. We tried for white sea bass in the morning, then switched to rockfishing when we could find no squid and got no bites. The rockies were a bit slow until we finally found some hungry ones at about the 15th stop. We worked 100'-120' of water from the Keyholes south for limits of mostly nice browns and blacks and a few vermilion, plus four lings. There's still a lot of small mackerel out there and dropping a few live ones to the rocky bottom probably would have increased our ling take. I tried the addition of a single assist hook to the top of my metal jig yesterday and it increased my hook-up rate. It also got stuck in my thumb while a lingcod twisted on the other hook until my hook came dislodged. It was pretty uncomfortable and I think I might return to the single hook.