If ever was a season to allow deep water fishing, this is it. A shortened Dungeness crab season was followed by the announcement of a complete salmon fishing closure both sport and commercial. This week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife enacted an emergency in-season regulations change lowering the daily bag limit for California halibut. The health and abundance of a few critical rockfish species has recovered well enough that the DFW now allows fishing past the previously inviolable 300-foot line. ’Tis the season for Deep Sea Fishing. Chris’ Fishing trips , launching from Monterey Harbor has found at least one sweet spot. Reports this week show the Check Mate returning to home base with full limits of chilipeppers and limits of lings as well. Working out of Moss Landing, the Kahuna also reported full limits of rockfish for their trips this week, along with a few lingcod and up to 22 Petrale sole. Charter operations out of Santa Cruz tell the same story. Stagnaro’s Sportfishing summed up their weekend results thus, “LIMITS on all seven-hour deep sea trips: Thurs. 5/18, Fri. 5/19, Sat. 5/20, Sun. 5/21. Twilight 4.5 hour cod trip (nearshore) 5/20 had about half limits, plus a 15-pound Lingcod! Rodney Armstrong from Santa Cruz Coastal Charters reported on Monday saying, “Today went great. We went hunting for chili peppers again. The weather was a bit choppy and did not really run into chilis. We found big yellows, canaries, and vermilion. Also a couple sole.” And, the boys on our favorite Go Fish Santa Cruz Charter’s Miss Beth reported “We fished the deep waters today. Our first drift we found small fish so we made a move where we found big rock cod including vermillion, green spots and chili peppers.”

North of Point Sur, we are now allowed to keep only two legal (minimum 22-inch) halibut as a daily bag limit. Below Point Sur, the bag limit remains at five fish per day. The move to reduce keeper halibut numbers comes as no surprise.   We’ve enjoyed four of five years in a row now of very good halibut fishing. The numbers of sport-caught fish kept or caught and released have been historically high. Halibut abundance follows a number of factors, most important perhaps being ocean water temperatures during spawning. Warmer waters means more spawning activity and results in more legal fish to catch after at least a four-year maturation to size process. These past few years, we’ve had cooler water in our area of the coastal Pacific. This implies lower halibut abundance predictions for the next few years at least.   Combine that factor with the increased number of anglers that will target halibut due to the fact salmon is not available, and a lower legal take really makes sense. Many sport, charter and even commercial halibut anglers were already calling for reducing the bag limit this year, in order to protect abundance numbers in the near future.

Though water temps remain slightly low in Monterey Bay right now, the halibut are definitely moving in to their historical feeding and spawning areas. Halibut reports have bee somewhat scarce, mainly because most boaters are heading for the deepwater reefs with the relaxation of depth limitations for this year. Also, open salmon season means many more boats plying the bay than we are seeing right now. Quite a few of those anglers would switch out to nearshore halibut drifts when the offshore conditions was snotty, or just for a change of menu. Many boats and anglers have not touched the saltwater this year due to the close of king salmon fishing.