Monday, February 25, 2019

   First, a recent report from Zack Jessee:"Went out crabbing in Tomales over the 16-17 and had decent luck. Tried out some new cone shaped crab traps I just recently acquired and soaked at night to hit a slower tide. We were able to grind out a 2 man limit of dungeness and kept some monster rock crab as well. They all tasted great! The new traps fished really really well, but were a real pain to get crabs out. Sadly lost one trap to the sea. Thanks for the continual updates!" The bay is hard on traps, even on a slower tide. Good job on the limits. Crabbing has been pretty slow but it looks like you've got the grinding figured out.
    Surfperch fishing has been mostly slow. The storms keep erasing the holes the perch like. These storms aren't supposed to bring much swell, so by this weekend there may be some surfperch catching to do. The rain will probably not help the leopard shark fishing from shore but might make the deep holes in the bay good places to try from a boat.
    This year's salmon season won't be determined until April. What we get for a season depends partly upon what they expect for this year and partly on how many showed up last year. Not enough fish returned last year  (105,000 out of a minimum of 151,000) which is bad, as salmon will continue to be considered "overfished".  What did show up was a lot of two-year-old fish, indicating an expected ocean abundance of over 400,000 kings for this season. These would be the salmon that were spawned during the heavy rain winter of 2016-2017. Go figure, more water means more fish. With luck that will translate into more opportunities and more success for this year.

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hopefully the bureau-rats will predict a bad year, which normally translates to a great year.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Make up your mind deleted author....

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  5. Let’s hope for good upwelling and holding conditions for the feed to show up and stay for a while...
    No food = no fish :(

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