California Archives - Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Marine Protected Area Proposals Advance as California Commission Takes Up Fishing Rules

November 6, 2026 — Proposed changes to California’s network of marine protected areas are moving into the next stage of consideration following an October vote by the California Fish and Game Commission, with several of the actions carrying potential implications for Southern California boaters and anglers.

The Commission granted seven marine protected area petition actions for consideration through future rulemaking. Among them are two tribally led proposals that would create new MPAs at Point Sal and Carpinteria Reef, both along the Santa Barbara County coast.

The Carpinteria Reef proposal places part of the continuing statewide MPA review directly along the Southern California coast and could eventually affect how portions of those waters are managed. For local sportfishing operators, however, the potential effects extend beyond the boundaries of another protected area.

Jaime Diamond, owner of Stardust Sportfishing in Santa Barbara, said the Point Sal proposal is outside the geographic range of the company’s operations, but the Carpinteria proposal is a different matter.

“The closure off of Carpinteria will virtually eliminate our most affordable and accessible trip, the 1/2 day,” Diamond told The Log. “This will also eliminate our ability to offer introductory fishing trips for first timers, families, the elderly, or safe trips close to harbor for special needs children and severely disabled veterans.”

Diamond said the area also provides access to longstanding fishing grounds for species including calico bass, sand bass, white seabass, barracuda and halibut. In her view, losing access to those grounds would be particularly significant because other areas traditionally used for those fisheries are already within MPAs.

Her concerns extend beyond the sportfishing fleet. Diamond described the Carpinteria area as an important entry point for people learning to fish, dive and participate in other forms of ocean recreation.

“The addition of an MPA off of Carpinteria will be the end of the local learning fishing grounds,” Diamond said. “Carp Reef, Horseshoe Rock, Horseshoe Kelp and the surrounding sandy bottom are located just off of Santa Claus Beach, where Carpinteria and Goleta-Ventura kids learn to fish, dive and hunt on or in the water.”

Read the full article at the Log

New NOAA Rule Helps Fishing Crews Reduce Whale Entanglements and Save Time

November 6, 2026 — NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region has finalized a new rule for the groundfish fishery that gives fishing crews new options to reduce the risk of whale entanglements. Fishermen say it will also help them save time and money hauling and buying line.

This rule now allows commercial fishing vessels to deploy strings of groundfish gear on the sea floor with just one line to a buoy at the surface. Previously each string required two buoy lines—one at each end. The Pacific Fishery Management Council sought the changes to reduce the number of vertical lines in the water. These lines can entangle whales and other marine life in fishing gear along the West Coast.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

CALIFORNIA: Northern California Dungeness crab season delayed until 2027

November 4, 2026 — California’s commercial Dungeness crab season will remain closed in the northern part of the state until at least Jan. 1, 2027, as fishery managers respond to humpback whale entanglements.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the delay Oct. 30, citing the number of humpback whales entangled in fishing gear this year. The department said postponing the commercial opener will give whales more time to migrate out of California waters before crab gear is deployed.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

CALIFORNIA: No crab for the holidays as 2026 Dungeness season delayed to protect whales

November 2, 2026 — For the seventh consecutive year, California officials are delaying the Bay Area’s commercial Dungeness crab season because of the high number of migrating humpback whales already getting ensnared by old crab-pot fishing lines and other gear.

And again this year, conservation groups are expressing frustration with what they say is a too-slow transition to safer fishing methods that would allow the industry to get back on the water earlier.

The 2026-27 Dungeness season normally would start Nov. 15 – meaning Californians traditionally enjoyed crab on Thanksgiving and for the winter holidays.

Instead, commercial crabbing from the Oregon border south to Point Conception in Santa Barbara County has been postponed until at least Jan. 1, 2027, “due to the number of humpback whale entanglements during the 2026 calendar year,” state officials said.

“Unfortunately,” said senior scientist Geoff Shester, Oceana’s director of fishery innovation, “California is still the nation’s leader – or loser? – with the most entanglements reported of any U.S. state,” according to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.

Read the full article at The Fresno Bee

How El Niño could threaten your favorite seafood for years to come

October 29, 2026 — Squid are shifting to cooler water, young salmon are struggling to find food sources, and concern is growing for Oregon’s $100 million Dungeness crab harvest as a powerful El Niño weather pattern heats up coastal ocean temperatures from California to the Pacific Northwest. Scientists expect the phenomenon to last for several months, leaving fishermen such as Phil Fogle scrambling.

Fogle, who owns two squid fishing boats based in the port of Anacortes, in Washington state, normally would keep fishing until foul weather sets in — his boats operate from Eureka, California, to Kodiak, Alaska. Instead, Fogle tied up his boats last week and furloughed his seven employees. The squid that normally inhabit coastal water have fled offshore for colder, deeper water that are harder to reach for smaller boats.

“Those little buggers are really affected by water temperature,” Fogle said about the squid. “It has been devastating to us.”

He said he’s losing about $50,000 a month.

Fogle said he’s waiting for the El Niño conditions to pass and hoping to get on the water again early next year.

This year’s El Niño, the strongest on record, has led temperatures off the Pacific Northwest coast to jump 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from 1991 to 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. El Niño’s warmth has arrived on top of an existing marine heat wave in the Gulf of Alaska, according to Steven Bograd, senior climatologist at NOAA.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

CALIFORNIA: Bay Area conservationists team up to address crab-fishing entanglements

October 29,2026 — Bay Area conservationists are teaming up with commercial fishers to reduce whale-entanglement risks while supporting the local Dungeness crab industry.

The Marine Mammal Center and The Nature Conservancy this month formed a partnership with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations to form the Dungeness Crab and Whale Conservation Collaborative.

The effort will develop a modern whale-monitoring system that allows California wildlife officials to make more informed decisions about when to open and close parts of the state’s coastline to commercial fishing.

Read the full article at the San Francisco Examiner

The Permitting Bill Fishermen Can’t Afford to Ignore

October 29, 2026 — On November 9, the Senate is scheduled to take up the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, known as BAAJA (S. 5653). This legislation is not about Mexican sheep; instead, the dense 400-page bill rewrites how the federal government approves energy, mining, and infrastructure projects. Its sponsors, Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Mike Lee (R-UT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), call it a historic compromise. I call it a historic risk for fishing communities.

The coalition behind BAAJA is unusual. The American Petroleum Institute (oil and gas), the American Clean Power Association (wind and other renewables), and major organized labor groups support it. Tribal nations, historic preservation groups, and ocean conservation organizations oppose it.

Commercial fishermen have been mostly absent from this fight, and that needs to change. BAAJA rewrites the rules for offshore wind farms, export cables, offshore oil and gas, and seabed mining. It changes how those projects are approved, how long the approvals last, and how hard they are to challenge. Nearly every change reduces the leverage fishermen have used to protect fishing grounds historically, and that’s not a coincidence.

The Senate outcome is close to being settled. The House is a different story, and that is where fishermen still have a real opening. But we must make our voices heard, and soon.

What this issue is about

Fishermen have spent more than a decade fighting for a real voice in offshore wind decisions. Lease areas have been granted on productive fishing grounds over industry objections, and project layouts have been set with little regard for how fleets actually fish or what they need for safe transit. Too often, fishermen’s concerns have been treated as a box to check rather than a reason to change course.

BAAJA would shrink what voice fishermen have left in the regulatory process for energy permitting. Its supporters pitch it as protection for clean energy, pointing to the 2025 federal stop-work orders that halted offshore wind projects already holding permits. The bill delivers that protection by making permits nearly impossible to revisit once they are issued, and much harder to challenge before then during the planning process.

The bill doesn’t stop at wind. Its “protections” for energy projects from public scrutiny and challenge cover any federally permitted project with a private sector sponsor, including offshore oil and gas wells and mines. The same rules that would wall off a wind farm from fishermen’s objections would wall off an offshore drilling lease or a seabed mining permit.

CALIFORNIA: A Fledgling Fishery Hopes to Turn the Tide on Whale-Safe Gear

October 28, 2026 — At 7:30 on a clear morning in December 2025, I arrived at the marina in Oxnard, California, in search of Mikey Volaski, one of the only commercial fishers in North America whose operation is dedicated to brown box crab.

His crew met me at the marina gate and escorted me to Volaski’s boat, the Coastal Reign—a pearly New England-style fishing vessel with a V-shaped hull for cutting through rough waters. Justin Harrison-Muñoz, the more experienced of Volaski’s two deck hands, had fished in Alaska before moving to California in 2020. Gerardo Barrera had never boarded a boat until he got a job with Volaski about five years ago. But he loved the work. “The ocean is my office, and I like that,” he told me. As the two loaded bait—a plastic trash can full of frozen mackerel—the rubbery sound of a barking sea lion rang through the marina.

Volaski showed up at 8, after finishing an all-night shift at the fire station, a job that helped support his fishing. He had grown up in a fishing family, and now was building his own operation. Wiry, with a neatly trimmed blonde mustache, he leapt aboard, and, with an air of efficiency, immediately fired up the motor and pulled away from the dock. On the way out to trap sites near California’s Channel Islands, Harrison-Muñoz chopped the mackerel and Barrera loaded chunks of it into small, bright-orange canisters with slits that would allow the crabs to sense the bait but not eat it.

Their target was the brown box crab (Lopholithodes foraminatus), an oddly charismatic crustacean with a spiky, mottled, peachy-pink shell. It looks like a cross between a pine cone and a dish scrubber. When alarmed, instead of snapping its claws at antagonists, the crab tucks its legs tightly against its body, forming the protective, boxy shape for which it is named.

Box crabs aren’t widely known as seafood. Unlike the more popular Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister), which live in the shallows and the intertidal, box crabs can venture 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) below the surface—deeper than the tallest Los Angeles skyscraper is high. Partly because they are harder to reach, they have never sustained a commercial fishery long-term. But Volaski is part of a small but growing experiment to try to change that—and in the process demonstrate that commercial crab and lobster fishers can make a living without endangering whales.

Traditional shellfish operations rely on underwater traps marked with floating buoys. The heavy ropes and lines that attach the buoys to the traps dangle vertically through the water, creating hazards for swimming animals. Once entangled, a whale can swim thousands of miles with fishing lines, nets, or metal tearing into its skin. Entanglement is one of the leading causes of injury and death to whales worldwide. Because of this threat, some fishers have been working with researchers and conservationists to develop an alternative—a technology called “ropeless” or “pop-up gear.” Ropeless gear allows fishers to keep their traps secure on the seafloor—without any vertical lines—until they are ready to retrieve them.

As we approached the first trap site, Volaski showed me how his setup worked. He had chosen gear designed by two West Coast companies, Sub Sea Sonics and Guardian Ropeless Systems, and aimed specifically at affordability: about $1,500 per unit, a fifth of the cost of higher-end models. In this system, a box called a “sled” sits on the sea floor attached by a long horizontal rope (or line) to a set of crab traps. Volaski used an app on his smartphone to trigger the sled to release an orange buoy about the size of a basketball, which soon popped up at the surface with the line in tow. He then maneuvered the boat until the buoy was at the starboard side, and the crew lifted it from the water with a long pole. They attached the buoy’s line to a pulley system, called a pincher-puller, which began reeling in the sled and the seven traps that trailed behind into the boat. It made a horrific whine. To position the traps at the depths where the crabs live, the crew needed more than 200 meters (700 feet) of line.

In the beginning, “all that line coming off at once” was scary, said Harrison-Muñoz. “You get tangled up on it, that’s going to take you right overboard.”

By this point, however, the three men had found a rhythm. Harrison-Muñoz had a carefully choreographed method for turning the rope to make sure it stacked neatly back in the sled as it came aboard. He often persuaded the younger Barrera to do much of the heavy lifting, hoisting each trap onto the deck. “Keeps him off his phone,” Harrison-Muñoz joked. The men sorted dozens of crabs, storing some in a plastic bin and tossing back the smaller ones. One of the traps held a box crab nearly 18 centimeters (7 inches) across, the biggest they had ever caught. The crew repeated this process with a second set of traps near Anacapa Island, then sailed another half-hour to the west side of Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, where they retrieved and reloaded a third set. The whole process consumed about half of the day, even though Volaski had to set aside his original plan to retrieve a fourth and fifth set of traps when the ocean whipped up intense tidal currents. By the end, everyone’s overalls were dripping from the waist down, and we all reeked of mackerel.

About halfway back to the marina, whitecaps and ripples appeared on the ocean surface. Then dozens of dolphins arced into the air on both sides of the boat. A squabble of gulls hovered above. But Volaski had seen something else. A humpback fluke lifted up a hundred meters away, then sank into the water. Then more whales—10 or 15 swimming in the distance. Then closer. He stopped and turned off the engine. Volaski’s pointed finger followed a shape under the water. We heard the low-pitched blast of a whale spout, its back rounding out just a few meters behind the boat, then immediately beside us. It was examining us. We were almost close enough to touch.

Read the full article at The Fern

CALIFORNIA: California commercial fishers, conservationists join forces to reduce whale entanglements

October 27, 2026 — Conservation groups have joined forces with California’s commercial fishers in a new partnership aimed at protecting whales while keeping the state’s Dungeness crab fishery open.

“California’s commercial fishermen have a long history of finding solutions to challenges on the water,” Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) Executive Director Lisa Damrosch said in a release. “This partnership brings that experience together with some of the best minds in science and conservation, with fishermen at the table from the very beginning. Together, we have an opportunity to find a better balance between protecting whales and sustaining a healthy, viable Dungeness crab fishery.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US announces USD 15.8 million in financial relief for fishery disasters

October 26, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has allocated USD 15.8 million (EUR 14.1 million) in funding for multiple fisheries disasters impacting the states of California and Florida, as well as the Makah Tribe in Washington.

“The U.S. seafood industry plays a critical role in our coastal economy,” NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs said in a release. “Our fishermen depend on each catch to sustain their livelihoods, yet fishery disasters can have devastating impacts on the businesses and communities that rely on these resources. NOAA is committed to supporting and uplifting our coastal businesses and communities through such challenges so they can continue to thrive.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource