Coastal Update Winter 2023
The Spawn is On! (note the foam) Spinnaker, Sausalito. 1/20/23 1pm)
Wow. I've been praying to Poseidon for rain for about a decade and now we've had a decade's worth of rain in one month! Careful what you ask for, I guess. I gave my two cents in this story: On Your Mark, Get Set, Spawn: The Annual SF Bay Herring Run Is About to Begin. If you're tempted but don't know how to cast a herring net...I'll plug my new coastal foraging class dates HERE.
Anyway here's the skinny on the storm of the decade:
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Yes we need the water. No it isn't the end of the drought (though every bit helps). If you have any interest in our current water predicament, Alastair Bland, (great writer and brother in the herring), recently published this informative piece in Cal Matters... please check it out: Is California’s drought over? Here’s what you need to know about rain, snow, reservoirs and drought
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As if the—now normal—delay to the crab season wasn't hard enough on the crab fleet, the fishermen, having lost Thanksgiving and Christmas (historicallty the two biggest market days for local crab) have been utterly pounded for the last month. Huge seas and driving winds do not treat crab pots gently. Bear in mind that a fully rigged crab trap costs the fisherman approx 300-400 bucks.
And a lot of the guys dropped pots in shallow water this year (as there were some crabs inshore) and many of these poor souls lost a lot of pots. I'm hearing about long time veterans putting their boats up for sale, having heart attacks... this kind of stuff. Bear in mind what happens when a pot gets sanded in. One guy described to me having to put a large car engine-driven-pump on board the boat, feeding the ejection tube down the length of the rope and power blasting the sand out of the trap. This takes hours. Many hours. In rough seas. Imagine that you've got 100 pots to clear. Eee gads. No thanks.
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The crab dock price has fluctuated wildly. The only consistent thing has been inconsistency. Some buyers are paying pennies (the largest seafood company on the west coast opening at $2.00 per # was like a dagger in the heart to some guys--seriously). Small “truck buyers” paid more and weekend dock sales down in HMB have been around 12 bucks per pound (that was two weeks ago, on the two boats I checked). Some buyers at the wharf are reporting that they can't get rid of their crabs and some can't get enough. So WTF? Honestly, I can't make any sense out of it.
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But since we're on the subject of crab I want to announce that I've never been happy with the way we do crab at Sea Forager. The reasons are as follows: 1. everyone wants live crab, 2. I can't keep crabs alive in a cooler filled with ice. 3. Cooking is expensive, time consuming and a general pain in the caudal fin. Plus which half the fun of Sea Forager is cooking the stuff yourself, right? 4. In the old days we used to split the crabs into pieces and deliver them raw, dead and halved. As much as I like crabs this way, not everybody does. So...
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WE'RE GOING TO TRY AN EXPERIMENT. Some day soon we're going to do a Sea Forager crab pop-up! Stay tuned for details about live crab delivery. I will make 3-4 strategic stops where people can come and get live crab (I mentioned this up above so no need to repeat it all here). Camilla will fill in the details in a few days. If it works out, if you guys actually buy enough to make it worthwhile, I'll continue doing it... anyway, more on this later.
HERRING!
Important: I am no longer sending text blasts and tweets about herring. If you want to know details about the 2023 herring spawns check out the The Herring Report on thelostanchovy.com
Winter for this particular sea forager could more aptly be called herring season. (Most of you probably know this). I start getting the itch in late November and by mid January if I haven't been on a spawn I start getting grumpy. Like I want to knock people's hats off grumpy. Which is about where I am now.
Spinnaker 01/20/23
Third hand reports from various biologists inform us that we've got an epically huge biomass inside SF Bay right now and because there has been so little gill netting the last few years (commercial pressure has been almost zero) lots of larger (read: older) fish—the likes of which we haven't seen in decades—are showing up in the DFW test trawls.
Anyway we've all been ready for the herring to spawn since Christmas but the herring have had other ideas. So much fresh water has been pumped into the system since December that the “silver darlins” seem to be holding off on their procreative behavior. Word has it that some fish showed up by the Ferry Pavilion in Sausalito the last three nights (1/17-1/21) around high tide, but despite crazy midnight texts from people I don't know :( there hasn't really been a proper spawn. Most of the nets pictured in these texts had a max of 5-6 fish. In any case Sausalito is sure to blow up any day now (in fact it's wide open at Spinnaker as I write this 1:10pm on 1/20/23) so keep an eye on thelostanchovy.com. And please don't send me texts unless the netters are averaging at least 5 pounds per throw!
Peninsular Herring & Etc
Last year was the first time in a decade that the fish skipped Coyote Point/Burlingame entirely—which is just as well for me since HWY 92 remains closed. So I'm really hoping for a big spawn along the old China Basin area between the stadiums or maybe Candlestick Point again (like last year) but numerous drive-bys have yielded zero signs of imminent spawns in those areas.
For those Bay Area residents who have never witnessed a herring spawn, I encourage you to get out there and see one. How do you know when it's happening? (See thelostanchovy.com) Look at the bay and pay attention to birds! In winter months, if you see huge flocks of cormorants, or pelicans diving in the bay, or sea lions chasing fish in the shallows, or thousands of gulls waiting for the tide to go out so they can hop down the rocks and feast on eggs—then you are witnessing an inshore herring spawn. A magical event that has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. Hopefully the timing works out this year and there is actually some commercial herring available on the days our deliveries go out, how nice would that be? Only problem is there's only two boats fishing and as far as I know they haven't even dropped nets yet. Fingers crossed. (And if you're new here, you can find some vintage Sea Forager herring entertainment here.)
BTW former employee of Sea Forager Will West is planning to start his tinned herring biz this year with the San Francisco Herring Company. Godspeed!
Night Smelt
Last year started well and ended badly for the night smelt—not gonna lie. I can't imagine all this rain is going to improve that. But one thing to know, if it turns out to be a decent year I may be inclined to start up my night smelt tours again. We'll see how it goes by the end of February.
Salmon News
The news out of salmon nation is... words escape me... Dismal? Dark? Depressing? Choose your D word. I'm going to try to summarize this in as few words as possible. So please excuse the lack of nuance here. Salmon returns to the Sacramento Basin are monitored closely by DFW. In order for DFW to open the Chinook salmon season they want to see 122,000 salmon returns to the Sac Basin at a base minimum. This year's count.... drum roll please... somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000. But wait, it gets worse! Every year DFW makes fairly accurate estimates of ocean abundance based on jack counts. Jacks are two year old fish that return to spawn early in their life cycle. They comprise a small subset of spawning salmon but the formula by which ocean populations can be predicted via jack count has proven to be fairly accurate over the years. Suffice to say, the jack count this year was terrible. As bad as 2007's jack count which lead to complete closure of the salmon fishery in 2008.
Want some good news? Too bad, there isn't any! Due to the fact that anchovies have been super abundant the last few years, salmon are feasting on anchovies in great profusion. What this means is that they aren't eating krill and other foods that give them the nutrients they need to make healthy babies. To summarize, many baby salmon are suddenly being born with a Thiamin (Vitamin B1) deficiency. These small fry are so deformed and weak they don't even make it to the ocean. Last year the DFW actually administered Thiamin to hatchery salmon and guess what? It worked (your tax dollars going to something worthwhile). But what about all the fish that don't spawn in hatcheries? What about the native spawners? The wild fish? Well... to summarize a conversation with a fisheries biologist... “they're fucked.” If you are a true glutton for punishment, here's another article by ace reporter Alastair Bland: Thiamin deficiency.
Ok so now it's time for good news, right? Ha ha. Not so fast! It actually gets worse. Remember last year when the season was broken up into multiple open/closed days so that fisheries managers could more closely monitor commercial catch? The number they had projected at the beginning of the season was 87,000 some odd commercially caught fish. But despite all the head aches associated with last year's start n' stop season, the official count is now in. The commercial fleet caught somewhere around 215,000 chinook salmon. Ugh. Way over the projected number. But here's the thing... there were a lot of fish from other areas (non Sacramento Basin fish) mixed in with the catch. This is, after all, a mixed fishery. So the question is... what percentage of that large catch number were Sacramento fish? And what percentage came from non Sac hatcheries, Oregon and Washington? Or conversely, is that 215,000 caught salmon number the reason why only 60-70,000 fish returned to the spawning grounds? The big DFW salmon meeting happens in early March. There fisheries managers will crunch the numbers and come up with some answers. But hopes for a California salmon season in 2023 look bleak.
Look, I realize this all seems very doom and gloomy. But honestly the best thing you can do is support the sustainable fisheries that we do have. Blackcod, rockfish, herring, halibut, albacore. Salmon will rebound, just like they did from 2009-2022. The advantage to having a state-run hatchery system is that we can figure out how many fish are out there and when they need a break. I will keep everyone posted when the meeting happens in March. Until then... that's it for my coastal update winter 2023. Looking forward to meeting some of you guys on the new crab delivery day (haven't decided yet what day of the week that's gonna be, but stay tuned).
NEW TOUR DATES: I just added more dates for my coastal foraging classes HERE. Join me! Outside magazine
LIVE SEA SHANTIES: 
Raise a glass of grog with The Fishwives on Saturday, February 4th (2-6pm, 21+) at a pirate party in support of the Pacifica Resource Center. DETAILS.
Hope to see you out there!
Kirk-out