Mitch Hamilton sent in this picture with the note, "Managed to scrape up 16 out of the bay today, spotted a whale south of hog island as well. Good day with the kids and grandkids " You were definitely doing some serious scraping to catch 16 Dungeness inside the bay, Mitch. Others are catching too, but not too many. There were a few snare fisherpersons claiming four to six Dungeness from the shore this week, but my impression is that most shore crabbers were doing well to get a couple of legal reds. The successful ones I spoke to liked squid for bait, even though we seem to be selling a lot of anchovies to the snarers. Maybe a smorgasborg is in order. Outside the bay has been marginally better but there's still a lot more bad spots than good ones. When in doubt, go deeper. And north. There have been a few nice batches of crab caught off of the Towers on Ten Mile but there's also been empty pots. Again, deeper was better, but avoid 140 to 170 feet of water there as that's better rockfishing than Dungeness crabbing. It's also one of my favorite rockfish spots, so don't fish there, either. Of course, I kid, sort of. The rockfishing has been mostly slow since the big swells rolled through, but a few guys have done well at it, so my guess is the fish are scattered in shallower and hopefully more bitey out deeper where the swells wouldn't reach them. 

    The slowish Dungeness crabbing should continue for a few more weeks as the commercial season has been delayed for whales yet again. They might get to open in mid-December, depending on the whales. Whales in Tomales Bay and pelicans still flying around probably don't bode well for the commercials. Well, next year we get to feel their pain. 

 

     Some of the guys that went to Ten Mile did really well on the Dungeness today, so maybe there's more out there than I'm being told. Or, these guys are lucky, or better crabbers, or both. Either way, they caught limits of Dungies down there. Another fellow told me that he caught two limits of Dungeness in the outer bay. It only took him three days to do it.  That's about on par with inside the bay. That said, on boat yesterday ended up with 12 Dungeness for several pots on Ten Mile, so the big beach is still far from guaranteed success. 

Got this email this afternoon: "Hey Willy

Thank you for the informative post on the 12th, I followed your clues Friday and Had a successful day With a friend.

Richard" My clues didn't look as good as your pile of dead critters, Richard. My bugs were surely not as large. Nicely done, sir.

   Gage sent me this picture and note: "High Times Fishing, a frequent on the fishing report, had squid eggs on his traps in the channel across from the store" So, squid definitely enter the bay. They will spawn in the bay, although perhaps not in great numbers. I don't think this makes the area across the bay a squid spawn zone and therefore a place to reliably catch white sea bass (although I have caught them there...), or does it...? One female squid appears to carry two of these egg sacs, so for sure it looks like there were at least four female squid present. I'd get more excited except for the (recently warmed up to) 52ºF water temp. That seems too cold for white seabass or squid. Except, you know, squid were here. Maybe they don't know it's too cold? Do the seabass know? I'm pretty sure that I don't know.

    The crabbing story remains close to the same with a few in the bay, a few more outside the bay, and reasonably good first pulls from Carmet north. There's a good chance that the wind turning the water over may have chased the whales away which will possibly allow the commercial season to start in December. That will not make the crabbing any better. The low crab count coupled with a low price for crab will probably not make for many happy crabbers in the commercial ranks, either. At least we do it for fun.

     As the Dungeness crabbing continues to be kind of meh talk has apparently turned to rockfish: "For the comment board, any suggestions best area for rock fish in Tomales Bay area during Nov/Dec?

Thank you,

Jon M."  I'm not giving out any waypoints, but the following picture shows some good general areas. The red circled spots are pretty popular and the yellow, less so. Google Earth shows a lot of secrets. The further you go from the mouth of the bay the better the fishing, usually. 

     The crabbing continues more or less as it has, kinda slow for most. The outer bay started slow and kind of eased off from there, even though a couple guys today limited out there and a few more barely got any. Ten Mile isn't much better. North of Bodega Bay the crabbing is pretty good in the right spots. TIP: This goes for anywhere you're dropping your gear. If you are serious about crab then drop your pots in as many spots as you have gear for. Spread them out. The go back and start pulling them. Any pot that's empty goes back on the boat. Any pot with crab gets to stay. At the end of pulling, put your pots on the boat around your trap with the most crab. No crab in any pot? Start over. If the crab are there it doesn't take long for them to get in the trap. If they aren't there you need to move your gear. 1st absolute rule of crabbing: You won't catch crab where there are no crab. If you want to just drop your gear and hope for the best, cool; just don't expect a bunch of full pots this year. Sometimes crabbing is like fishing and you have to work for them. This is one of those times.

     Gage and I ended up with two limits of Dungeness, 18 rockfish and two lings. The crabbing was about as expected, kinda spotty. We dropped seven pots over a wide area to get an idea of where the crab are(n't). The results after three hours:

Towers 60 feet: 7 Dungeness

Halfway between Towers and Abbott's 60 feet: 5 Dungeness

Abbott's 60 feet: 1 red crab

Halfway between Abbott's and Kehoe 50 feet: 1 Dungeness 1 red

Kehoe 55 feet: 2 Dungeness 1 red

Two pots in outer bay, 55 feet: 12 Dungeness between them.

      The best grade of crab was at the Towers with four jumbos. Our pots in the outer bay were in the midst of a lot of other gear and I can't imagine there being many crab around there for too much longer. The rockfish bit kind of slow and there weren't as many on the meter as I usually see. Both Gage and I hooked into large lings that didn't stick. That's okay though, because the couple of lings we did catch were clearly getting ready to make more lings. It looks like the south wind is coming up tomorrow and a north swell on Saturday but Monday looks good so far.

 

     So the crabbing is slow, but nobody is trying for halibut. Well, not nobody: "Scott and Sharon Heiser from Sheridan, Greg Murphy from Calistoga with a 16 lb halibut on a tube jig. First ever" Nice fish, and especially so when nobody else is catching. I said the crabbing is slow, but one boat I spoke with yesterday had caught 51 Dungeness inside the bay in two days. The crew said they worked their butts off for them (It sounds like they almost traded chicken for crab on a pound-for-pound basis) but a lot of guys worked pretty hard to get one or two in the bay, so my pity is small. You could easily find 100 crabbers that didn't have 51 Dungeness between them during that time span. But someone did. Outside of the bay a few guys did well but most did not. Had one report from today from a guy working Ten Mile for a grand total of four Dungeness and two reds. He tried a number of places. It sounds kinda sucky for crabbing. I'm going to give it a try tomorrow but I'm not a good crabber. I need a target-rich environment and it sounds like I'm not going to get it. Go rockcod!
 

    Normally I wouldn't put pictures of fatalities on here, but this weekend we only had one and it was a Dodge. There were quite a few people trying to die in some abysmal weather but they were lucky. At least Herman and Rokefin were able to walk away from this one. With the wind gusting up over 30 knots the dispatchers sent 24 fire crews but a couple of tractors, a water truck and a bit of shovel work got the brush fire out before it got real exciting. If only the crabbing was as interesting. At least we get some calmer weather this week and with it some better crab reports.

    Our Friendly Commercial Fisherman sent a note about crab trap line: "Not only will unweighted yellow ropes result in lost pots, but instead of cutting the rope props can get bound up and cause the boat to drift helplessly into bad situations.  Every crab rope should have a line weight about 20’ from the float, long ropes need another lower down. The line weights are made to have the rope run through them, and the weight hit with a hammer to make it stick in place.  But i’s easy to use a short strand of rope to attach a weight, just splice it about 4 times, run it through the weight, and splice on the other side. Let’s keep it safe and also present ghost pots" In a pinch I've used monofilament to tie a sinker on the rope, or wire. Anything to sink that line. We call the floating rope gear near the mouth of the bay "murder pots" as winding one up on your prop while trying to cross the bar on an intermittent break will result in death. 

 

    The Point Reyes waverider buoy peaked at 20 feet every 14 seconds this morning, and while the Bodega Buoy never got much over 17 feet, I think it was a good day to stay off the ocean. I heard of one guy that jumped the bar and crabbed the outer bay for a grand total of six Dungeness. Inside Tomales Bay numbers I heard ran from zero (there were quite a few zeros) to 31. The hot spots? I don't think there were any. For every story I heard of a place with some crab there were three more stories of guys in the same place catching nothing. One fellow dropped a trap by Marker 5 and pulled seven Dungeness out of it an hour later, while another guy ran six traps in the same area for a grand total catch of a few reds. There was a lot of gear that went missing which I would usually blame on the current but there wasn't much of that today. It sounds like a lot of buoys got cut off by props, even on weighted lines. A sinking rope makes for a smaller target but doesn't guarantee someone can't hit it. It does make you wonder how the guy with a hundred feet of floating yellow rope ever gets his trap back. Quick answer: Often he doesn't. 

    Commercial Dungeness season has been pushed back until at least December 1st due to whales. While this gives the rest of us more of a chance to load up on crab in November it also means that, 1.) people that are hurting financially from the Covid closures get hurt some more (Restaurants closed; prices for fish dropped) and 2.) starting next year we get to suck it too, if the whales don't leave on schedule. While on some level I appreciate the communal sucking as something we can share and experience together, on another level I wonder why why should all be punished for the rebound of the whale. I, like any other seeing, feeling human, feel an enormous amount of awe and reverence at the sight of whales. The fact that our forebears hunted them to almost extinction is a stain on all of our souls. But, the fact that they have rebounded enough in numbers to find crab gear a danger is probably more of an indicator that their recovery is working than it is an indictment of our fishing techniques. I'm probably wrong (my wife says I usually am, at least when I argue with her) but I'm hoping that something that allows for everybody to coexist can get worked out. 

    This year, we sporties get to open early, though. And the weather kinda sucks. Tomales Bay should be doable tomorrow morning at least, but after that it gets really windy. The ocean will be bad. Up to 17 foot seas are predicted for the weekend. Getting out of Tomales Bay will close to impossible. People will try. My bet is that there's a 50:50 chance of a fatality tomorrow. We will try to discourage it. Cameron will be asking anyone planning on crossing the Tomales Bay bar to write their name in black marker on their body so that the Fire Department can identify their remains. For those of you planning on heading out, see Cam in the store. He has a pen for you. Barring that, stay in the bay. It turns out that crappy crabbing is better than dying. Who knew? If you can't wait for better weather, go to Bodega. You can still die in that kind of water from there but your area of demise can vary more. Or wait. We want to eat the crab, not feed them.

    Here's a last week report from Swampy: "Wanted to fill you in on the action from our three days there. Bait was plentiful with a few mackerel in the tank with the anchovies. Fished all day Tuesday for one missed bite, kinda on the slow side. Al caught the one fish on Wednesday but we added some rockfish heeding Gage and your advice, thanks. Just my son and I today for one butt apiece, a pretty good day. Think we missed two others. Had a great year and met a bunch of nice folks down there. Thanks for the memories, Swampy." There were a couple of other halibut caught this week but overall it was pretty slow. I heard of two on the bar and one out in 80 feet of water off of the Trees, caught while rockfishing. Rockfish have been pretty consistent which will be nice for something to do while crabbing. Not for the opener, though. So far Windy.com is calling for winds gusting to 40 knots and 12 foot seas on Saturday. This could change, of course, but at this time conditions look to be somewhere between subpar and fatal. Probably closer to the latter. And that's just inside the bay.