It seems that strange things are afoot. Albacore are being caught locally in December and with them, yellowtail. If you can find a kelp paddy or floating log early in the day, maybe a lot of yellowtail. North Bay Charters are lighting them up. Here. In December. Twenty yellowtail is a lot. They aren't giant but they kinda don't need to be. The water temps are maybe 58º at the higher end, which I guess is warmish for December (remember, our coldest water comes in May and June, so...) but it is officially not warm enough for yellowtail. At the same time, amateur and professional crabbers are both commenting that the relatively few Dungeness crab that they're catching are acting very sluggish and don't want to move around very much. The surface water ain't that warm, but perhaps the deeper water is warmer than it should be. The offshore warm water from Fort Bragg seems to have pushed down and in, with possible tuna sightings from reputable, knowledgeable people seeing tuna in 300' of water or even substantially less (150'?). Is it impossible to catch albacore over the shelf? No, just unlikely. My brother caught one once on top of Cordell in 200' of water. To be fair, he's really lucky, but still, it can be done. Maybe through a few feathers in while you're running for crab. You almost surely won't catch. But if you did.....well, you'll be boring your great-grandchildren with that story, as well as anyone that looks like they might fish. People will avoid you. You could be that guy. Good luck.

     CDFW will be evaluating their more recent whale data and deciding whether to allow commercial crabbing and traps or not. My guess is that probably not. The Preliminary Assessment and Management Recommendation from CDFW recommends a steady as she goes approach, no changes. A decision will be made in the next few days based off of this Recommendation and it's data. We shall see by Friday.

    In other bad news, salmon returns to the Sacramento River have been appallingly low. Minimum  numbers of eggs and spawners were not met. According to the methodology, this will mean that they were overfished, even without fishing. Good thing we didn't fish, eh? Pretty much every other river with a hatchery (that also trucked or otherwise enabled their smolts to avoid the river without water) has had really good to record returns. Some people say that trucking helps encourage a higher wandering factor in the smolts, and if true, that would account for the number of salmon showing up everywhere but where we want them. Lake Merritt? Really? There's no sewer outfall to swim up? Coleman Hatchery did truck smolts two years ago, and amazingly (not) they had a maybe decent number of jacks show up. We shall see what the real numbers are in March. We may get some kind of season if enough showed up at the right time. Not a good season, but I'll take almost anything. I'm tired of watching salmon jump while I'm halibut fishing. Officially, I am for a hatchery-only fishery, especially if that's the only way I get to salmon fish. Have the factories make lots of baby salmon, take off all their adipose fins, transport them past the river without water, and then let fishermen fish and only keep the ones without adipose fins. It has worked in other places. We aren't getting the water back for fish, wild or otherwise. Because money. So let's just figure out a way that we can go fishing.