West Coast Archives - Page 2 of 9

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

OREGON: Oregon looking at new rules for 3-mile-wide ribbon of ocean along the coast

October 28, 2026 — Oregon is taking a look at the three-nautical-mile-wide ribbon of ocean that runs along the length of the coast.

This offshore ribbon is managed under Oregon’s Territorial Sea Plan and covers issues as varied as undersea cables, fishing and renewable energies. But the plan is more than 30 years old and doesn’t consider emerging issues like climate change and ocean acidification.

“It’s high time to take a look at the foundational chapters of the Territorial Sea Plan and update them,” said Joe Liebezeit, the chair of the Ocean Policy Advisory Council.

So the Oregon Department of State Lands has asked the Ocean Policy Advisory Council to review the sea plan in an effort to strengthen protections for Oregon’s marine ecosystem and ensure Oregonians get fair compensation for the use of the seafloor.

Read the full article at OPB

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

CALIFORNIA: New partnership aims to reduce whale entanglements in California Dungeness crab fishery

October 26, 2026 — A new partnership of marine scientists, commercial fishermen, and conservationists aims to reduce whale entanglements in California’s Dungeness crab fishery while supporting the state’s fishing industry, a press release issued Thursday noted.

The Dungeness Crab and Whale Conservation Collaborative, announced by The Marine Mammal Center, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and The Nature Conservancy, is backed by a three-year grant from the Clean Break Fund.

The initiative will combine data from vessel surveys, drones, shore-based observations, underwater acoustic gliders, and satellite-based whale detections to improve understanding of whale movements and behavior.

Read the full article at NBC Bay Area

Commerce Department allocates $15.8M in fishery disaster funding to Fla., Calif., and Makah Tribe

October 23, 2026 — Today, NOAA announced the allocation of $15.8 million in fishery resource disaster funding, appropriated by Congress in the American Relief Act, 2025. The funding will address multiple fishery resource disasters that occurred in Florida, California, and for the Makah Tribe in Washington state between 2019 and 2024.

“The U.S. seafood industry plays a critical role in our coastal economy,” said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs, Ph.D. “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 NOAA Fisheries

Trump admin reignites battle over salmon, dams in Columbia River

October 21, 2026 — The federal government sparred with conservationists before a Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday in an effort to overturn an injunction in a long-running case concerning salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin in the Pacific Northwest.

“After a quarter century of judicial intervention, it’s time to return control of the Columbia River system to the federal agencies that Congress entrusted with that extremely complex task,” said Jacob Ecker, Justice Department attorney, referring to the operation of the 14 federal dams on the river.

The lawsuit over fish conditions began in 2001 and had reached an agreement until the Trump administration in June 2025 abruptly withdrew from the Biden-era 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which promised to spend $1 billion to protect endangered steelhead and salmon.

The agreement was the result of a deal struck with Oregon, Washington, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and the National Wildlife Federation, after they had proposed the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative.

Under the agreement, the government committed to immediate measures to protect salmon, along with a decadelong plan to manage hydropower operations while meeting rising energy needs.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service