FORT BRAGG, CA., 8/7/26 — A sport boat named Off Hours crossed Noyo Harbor on Thursday, rods racked, past the commercial boats tied along the dock — in the final days of a recreational salmon season the state cut short, now set to close Sunday, Aug. 9.
Managers moved up the season’s close for the Fort Bragg area to Sunday, Aug. 9, after recreational catch rates ran higher than expected — an early end to a fishery that only reopened this year, following a three-year closure. For a working waterfront that depends on salmon and Dungeness crab both, it was only half the news.
State officials laid out the salmon picture this week in Sacramento. At the state legislature’s annual Zeke Grader Fisheries Forum on Aug. 4, the department’s marine region manager, Craig Shuman, said in-season managers had shortened the Fort Bragg area’s season and closed the Klamath zone entirely to keep catches within limits — even as the fleet worked its first open salmon season since 2022.
The same forum brought little comfort on crab. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife signaled that the 2026-27 Dungeness crab season, the North Coast’s other mainstay, will again open cautiously, and probably late.
An unpredictable opening
Joanna Grebel, who manages invertebrate fisheries for the department, laid out four factors that decide when crab boats can leave the dock: whales, domoic acid, meat quality and fleet dynamics. This year, she said, the department will likely open the season cautiously — which could mean a delayed start, reduced gear, or both. She summed up the season ahead as “another adventurous and somewhat unpredictable opening for the crab fishery.”
Whales are the trigger. Under the state’s risk program, adopted in 2020 after a spike in whale entanglements, the fleet’s entanglement score sits at 2.25; if it reaches 3, the season is automatically pushed to Jan. 1. The mid-November start earlier crabbers grew up with, Bodega Bay fisherman Dick Ogg told the committee, is gone.
Domoic acid, a neurotoxin caused by marine algal bloom, is the bigger worry. “This one’s going to be a biggie this year,” Grebel told the committee, pointing to forecasts for a strong El Niño and two humpback whale deaths already tied to a spring bloom of the toxin in Monterey Bay. Crabs eat smaller animals that contain the toxin and store it in their internal organs.
The department is starting its testing earlier than usual, she said, watching whether levels approach the 2015-16 disaster, when domoic acid closed the fishery into late March in some areas and mid-to-late May in others and prompted a federal disaster declaration. Levels that season ran as high as 300 parts per million; the threshold for action is 30.
There are new tools this time. A 2021 state law allows crab to be eviscerated — the guts removed, where the toxin concentrates — so the meat can still be sold when the viscera test high, which could keep a season moving instead of shutting it down.
Fort Bragg sits in the northern grounds that took the brunt of last season’s delays. Ogg told lawmakers the northern management area held back over domoic acid and questions about meat quality while zones to the south, from Gualala on down, opened Jan. 5.
The whale question
Lisa Damrosch, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said the fishery has been managed largely out of fear since a 2016 entanglement spike she called a one-time event. Since the risk program took effect, she said, 95% of California’s Dungeness crab has been landed between December and March — outside the confirmed April-to-November window when migrating whales are off the coast. Federal regulators, she noted, have proposed moving the California fishery to a lower risk category.
Bodega Bay’s Ogg cites growth numbers. He said the humpback population is growing 5% to 8% a year — roughly 350 to 500 juvenile whales among an estimated 7,000 animals — while confirmed crab-gear entanglements have held steady or fallen. “I believe we should live by data, not by assumption,” he said. The cost of the current system, he said, is the lost Thanksgiving-through-New-Year’s holiday market, a hit to fishing families up and down the coast.
Crabbers land more than 80% of California’s Dungeness crab, Damrosch said. The 2025 catch was worth about $44 million, second only to market squid among the state’s commercial fisheries, according to figures Shuman presented to the committee.
The state’s crab gear working group meets in late September to sharpen the season outlook. Until then, Fort Bragg’s boats wait — as they have, in one form or another, for 10 years. For a fleet without a steady paycheck, Ogg said, a few lost days can make or break a season.