This halibut was caught this morning on a dead anchovy fished between Hog Island and the weather buoy. I also heard of a few caught today back by Marconi (Marshall). Cameron, Gage and I gave the halibut a try on Thursday, trolling from Marconi back to seven feet of water off of Inverness for a grand total catch of about 200 moon jellyfish and 500 pounds of that slimy, stringy algae that fouls up your swivels. The water was 60º but seemed devoid of any baitfish until we trolled back up to Heart's Desire Beach where there were schools of baitfish but not biting fish for us. There's a few fish around, as a few guys are catching a couple, but it ain't good. I guess if you're tired of dodging boats in San Francisco bay the relative peacefulness of Tomales Bay might look pretty appealing, and from my experience this week, peaceful and cold were the two operative words. Oh, and windy. Three operative words. 

      Crabbing has been pretty slow with most people catching one or two but nobody leaving here recently has been preparing for a crab feed unless they bought some somewhere. The Bay Area dead whale count has increased to nine (seven grays, a fin and a sperm) with the few confirmed causes of death so far being ships but "entanglement" is always listed as a possibility or likelihood for the undetermined deaths in the press releases. Luckily for us and the gray whales, the grays are no longer endangered. They are currently declining in number (a 24% drop since 2016) but they did the same thing in 1999-2000 and rebounded to higher numbers by 2015, so it is theorized that this may be a normal population fluctuation. The fact that sport and commercial crabbing occurred throughout that time would seem to indicate that crabbing has a negligible influence on Gray whales.