The CDFW have spoken, and the ruling is: Dungeness will open here, south of Gualala, on November 1st, the first Saturday in November, as usual. Traps will be illegal and only hoops and snares will be legal, as usual. Commercial guys get screwed with a delay, as usual. There's some domoic acid around, so we're being told to clean the crab before cooking, as usual. It's the new normal. At least the domoic acid isn't high enough to shut us down as they have up north. Or is it? Testing results are here, but so far I don't see Bodega Bay locations listed. Probably they know something, since they're announcing we can open. Samples have been delivered. I guess we'll find out soon enough. But as things stand today, we're opening on the 1st here, and no crab butter for you.
We only had a few boats hit the water this week and no fish were waved around by anybody in the boats. One boat had never crabbed before and they came back with two limits of red crab yesterday. They were pretty happy, but that's because they hadn't cleaned two limits of red crab before. I imagine that the joy moderated a bit with each critter processed. Catching a lot of anything seems like a good idea until you get to the cleaning table. The big takeaway is that there's 70 less red crabs to avoid inside the bay for Dungy season.
We watched a boat run towards the mouth of the bay this afternoon and he looked like he wanted to cross the breaking bar. Cameron accessed a camera on the hill and watched him jump a wave going over the bar before turning around and coming back in. It looked like a 22' C-Dory, so hopefully for them they didn't split the hull belly-flopping like a guy I know. Those flat, fuel conserving and stable riding hulls can sometimes be a problem. When the waves get big, deadrise is your friend. I'm hopeful that Wrybread can get us a Youtube video of the event.

