Bodega Bay Salmon Season 2026: Why the Window Is Short

"It's been phenomenal fishing," Captain Rick Powers told a reporter in July, standing on the dock at Porto Bodega with coolers full of king salmon behind him. "Wide-open limits every day. They're all big, beautiful salmon."

Powers runs Bodega Bay Sportfishing Center out of Porto Bodega Marina, and after nearly three years of closures, he has every right to sound relieved. But if you live here, you already know something Powers's quote doesn't quite say out loud: this season isn't running on a calendar. It's running on a number, and once that number is hit, the season ends, whether it's August 15 or the last week of the month.

That number is 34,900. It's the recreational harvest quota for the zone that stretches from Half Moon Bay through San Francisco, Bodega Bay, and up to Point Arena, and it's the reason the harbor has felt different this summer without anyone quite explaining why.

The Number Nobody Put on a Calendar

California's ocean salmon fishery hadn't reopened for sport anglers north of Pigeon Point since 2022. Chinook stocks tied to coastal rivers between the Russian River and Redwood Creek had dropped low enough to trigger Endangered Species Act protections, and three straight years of closures followed. Better rain and snowpack in 2023 and 2024 helped juvenile salmon survive the trip from river to ocean, and by this spring the state had enough of a rebound to open the water again, though not without a leash.

The recreational season opened June 27 and runs in two windows, June 27 through July 22 and August 1 through August 31, capped at that 34,900-fish quota for the whole zone. John McManus, senior policy director for the Golden State Salmon Association, put it plainly to a reporter this summer: fishing stays open "until a quota, a number of fish caught, is 34,900. When that number is hit, they will shut the fishery down."

That's not an abstraction on the water. Bodega Bay Sportfishing Center's charter boat, the Surf Scooter, landed just 14 fish on August 6, then came back the very next day with 181 fish for 17 anglers on a single full-day trip. Across the seven days ending August 8, that one boat alone accounted for 225 fish. Multiply that kind of swing across every charter and private boat working the zone, and you can see why nobody down at the docks is treating this as a settled, months-long season. It's a fast-emptying bucket.

Why the Season Almost Didn't Happen at All

Dick Ogg has fished out of Bodega Bay for more than 55 years and serves as president of the Bodega Bay Fisherman's Marketing Association. When the salmon season's restrictions were announced this spring, his reaction wasn't celebration. It was arithmetic.

"They've got to pencil it out, with the price of fuel and the price of food," Ogg said, describing the math every commercial boat runs before deciding whether a trip is worth taking. The commercial side of the season is even tighter than the recreational one: boats are limited to 160 salmon per opening, with an overall summer quota of just 83,000 fish coastwide, spread across five openings above Pigeon Point and ten below.

Ogg didn't pretend the reopening solved anything. "It's not quite what we would have liked, but it's a good supplement," he said. Bodega Bay Chamber of Commerce President Shona Campbell agreed with the underlying point: this is a town that lives and dies by the strength of its fishing industry, and one good salmon summer doesn't erase years of losses.

"There's no reason we should be in this predicament. We need to protect the industry as best we can."

That's Ogg again, and it's worth sitting with, because the other half of Bodega Bay's fishing economy isn't having a good summer at all.

The Other Half of the Harbor, Still Waiting

While salmon boats fill coolers, the Dungeness crab side of the harbor has already gone quiet for the year. The 2025-26 commercial crab season technically ran from November 1 through June 30, but it wasn't a clean run. Regulators closed the fishery again on April 30 after researchers spotted a high number of humpback whales feeding closer to shore than usual, a pattern attributed partly to warmer ocean temperatures pushing prey toward the coastline. Boats were allowed back on May 7, but only with expensive pop-up gear that keeps lines coiled on the seafloor until triggered acoustically, rather than the traditional traps and buoys most of the fleet still uses.

Ogg called that equipment cost prohibitive for boats that couldn't plan for it in advance. "If you don't have this equipment available and have to purchase it on short notice, it does not pencil out," he said. "It means people will have to stop fishing."

So right now, in late August, there are no crab traps in the water off Bodega Bay. The season closed on schedule at the end of June, and the next one won't open until the state runs its usual fall risk assessment on whale migration, a process that has pushed the traditional November 15 opener later in each of the past seven years. The same boats currently unloading salmon at Porto Bodega are the ones that will be waiting again come autumn to find out if crab season starts on time or gets pushed into January.

A Reminder of How Small This Town Still Runs

If you needed proof of how tightly this community operates, it showed up earlier this week. A 58-foot fishing vessel called the Lake Bay ran aground on a sandbar at North Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, just south of Bodega Bay in Marin County. Five days later, on Wednesday, August 26, salvage crews finally succeeded in dragging the boat further up onto the sand using an incoming tide and a second bulldozer, after days of rough seas had stalled the effort.

The Coast Guard's call not to attempt a rescue, choosing instead to let the boat run aground rather than risk a larger vessel sinking inside a national marine sanctuary, has stirred real frustration among local fishermen, who point to a similar fate that befell the Aleutian Storm at south Salmon Creek State Beach in 2024. Ogg, wearing his Fisherman's Marketing Association hat again, said local boat owners have already opened conversations with county officials about what could be done differently next time, so that fishermen and the Coast Guard have a plan worked out before the next boat ends up stuck on a sandbar rather than after.

It's a small story in the scheme of a whole coastline, but it's the kind of thing that only registers if you're paying attention to this harbor specifically, and it says something about how this community handles its own business.

What You'll Actually See on the Water This Week

Walk the docks at Porto Bodega on the right afternoon and you might catch a scene like the one charter captain Mike Harbarth of the Shauna Lee had in July, filleting his group's limit right there at the marina. Harbarth has fished long enough to remember when California's salmon season used to stretch from late winter into the following fall, a stark contrast to the tightly bracketed windows anglers are working with now. Head down Westshore Road and you'll find the usual line outside Spud Point Crab Company, the shack Tony and Carol Anello opened in 2004, where Tony's own boats, the Annabelle and the Cape Ommaney, supply crab and wild king salmon straight across the street from Spud Point Marina.

In the evening, the rhythm shifts. Bay View Restaurant & Lounge, inside the Inn at the Tides on Highway 1, is running its Winemaker Dinner Series through the fall, with a Hook & Ladder Winery dinner set for Friday, August 21, and a Benziger Family Winery dinner scheduled for Friday, September 18. It's a quieter counterpoint to a harbor that's otherwise been defined by dockside hustle and full coolers all summer.

The Date Everyone on the Water Is Watching

The summer recreational season, the one running against that 34,900-fish quota, closes August 31. A separate fall recreational phase opens September 1, but with a catch: Bodega Bay boats will have to travel south below the 38/02 line, just above Point Reyes, to keep fishing under that phase's 20,000-fish quota. Commercially, a separate fall season opens September 4 with its own 20,000-fish quota running from the San Francisco and Monterey zones north to Point Arena.

None of this reads like a fishery settling into a new normal. It reads like a fishery on a short leash, grateful for the room it's been given and watching the same number everyone else is watching. If the harbor has felt busier this summer, that's not a permanent shift in how Bodega Bay operates. It's a narrow, well-earned window, and everyone who works these docks knows exactly how it could close.

If you're already part of this town, you don't need anyone to tell you what a good salmon summer feels like. But if you're the kind of person who reads a story like this and starts wondering what it would take to actually live here, on this harbor, watching these same boats come in, Alexander Goodman knows Bodega Bay well enough to talk through what that would look like. Let's Connect.