BODEGA BAY, CA., 5/5/26 — For the first time in three years, commercial salmon boats are pushing out of Spud Point Marina with king salmon as the target.
But the season Sonoma County’s fleet returned to this month does not look much like the one it left behind in 2022.
After three consecutive statewide closures, federal and state fishery managers approved a limited 2026 commercial ocean salmon season for waters from Point Arena south to Pigeon Point — the stretch that includes Bodega Bay, Point Reyes, the Gulf of the Farallones and Half Moon Bay. It is the only commercial salmon fishery California is allowing this year. North of Point Arena, including Fort Bragg’s Noyo Harbor and the entire Klamath Management Zone, commercial fishing for Chinook remains closed.
That puts Sonoma County on the right side of the line. It does not necessarily put the fleet back to work in any familiar sense.
The 2026 commercial summer season opened May 1 and runs through August 27, built around staggered, multi-day openers — five clusters above Pigeon Point, ten below — with all fishing tied to a statewide harvest cap of 83,000 Chinook. The Point Arena-to-Pigeon Point zone is allocated between 31,200 and 34,000 of those fish — roughly 37 to 41 percent of the entire state’s commercial Chinook quota for the year. Each vessel can land up to 160 fish per open period, and the minimum size is 26 inches total length. Managers can shut the fishery early if the cap is approached, under an in-season management framework being used in the California commercial salmon fishery for the first time this year.
A separate fall commercial season is set to open September 4 in the San Francisco and Monterey zones, extending north to Point Arena, with a 20,000-fish quota of its own.
Translation: short windows, hard caps, a real chance of an early close, and a long stretch of summer with no boats out at all.
For a port that has spent three seasons watching empty slips at Spud Point and Mason’s Marina, that is both more than 2025 offered and less than a recovery.
“It’s not quite what we would have liked, but it’s a good supplement,” Dick Ogg, chairman of the California Salmon Council and president of the Bodega Bay Fishing Management Association, told is last week. Ogg has fished out of Bodega Bay for more than 55 years.
“They’ve got to pencil it out — with the price of fuel and the price of food,” he said of his fellow captains. “There’s no reason we should be in this predicament. We need to protect the industry as best we can.”
Three years that reshaped the harbor
Bodega Bay’s commercial salmon fleet has been shrinking and aging for years. Three straight closures — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — accelerated the squeeze. Boats sat. Crews left. Some captains pivoted to crab, black cod, tuna, halibut or albacore. Some took on debt. Some sold out.
A 2025 CalMatters report described the harbor as a “ghost town,” with seafood businesses, fuel sales, ice purchases and dockside repair work all running well below historical norms. Sonoma County Regional Parks responded with a temporary dock fee waiver program at Spud Point and the Sonoma County Sport Fishing Center, allowing eligible commercial fishermen and charter operators — those with at least six landings between 2021 and 2023 — to save an average of $300 a month. The program ran through the end of 2024.
The damage was never just on the boats. Salmon pulls a long economic tail through Bodega Bay: Tides Wharf and Spud Point Crab Company on the buyer side, fuel docks and ice plants on the operations side, charter operators and the Inn at the Tides on the visitor side, and the annual Bodega Bay Fisherman’s Festival — held this year on May 2 — as the cultural anchor.
When the boats stop, every link in that chain feels it.
What “open” actually means in 2026
Within the May-through-August windows, captains face the 160-fish-per-vessel landing limit, the 26-inch size minimum and the looming possibility of an early close if the statewide quota fills.
Ogg’s economic point is the one that decides who actually fishes. A salmon trip costs about the same whether a boat brings back 40 fish or 160. Fuel, ice, bait and deckhand pay do not scale down to match a short trip. The 160-fish vessel cap turns the math from “fish until the bite stops” into “fish until the cap, then run home.”
Market price will decide as much as fish abundance. Fresh, locally landed wild Chinook can command premium prices — particularly with no commercial product coming out of Fort Bragg or the Klamath zone — but processors and restaurants set up to handle large, predictable landings will hesitate to commit to a fishery that might close with two days’ notice.
A different season for sport boats
Recreational salmon fishing is on a separate track. The Sonoma Coast falls within the San Francisco recreational management area, which opens June 27 and runs through July 22, with another open period continuing through August. The Pacific Fishery Management Council set a 34,900-Chinook recreational guideline for the broader area between San Francisco and Fort Bragg.
Charter operators out of Bodega Bay have been booking trips, and sport anglers are once again accessing the Sonoma Coast for ocean salmon. A working recreational season helps charter captains, tackle shops, motels and restaurants in a way the commercial-only metric does not capture. It is also, for many longtime visitors, the real signal that salmon season has come back to the Sonoma Coast — even if the commercial fleet is still operating under restrictions that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
The longer arc
The reasons regulators were able to approve any 2026 commercial season at all sit upstream and out of state. Wetter winters since 2023 eased drought stress on Central Valley rivers. The Klamath River saw the largest dam removal in U.S. history completed in October 2024, with four hydroelectric dams gone and salmon already recolonizing newly accessible habitat by the thousands.
The numbers that broke the closure are blunt. Sacramento River fall-run Chinook — the backbone of California’s ocean salmon fishery — saw 2025 escapement of 130,432 adults to natural spawning areas and another 34,331 to Central Valley hatcheries. More tellingly, jack returns — two-year-old fish that act as a leading indicator of next year’s adult run — jumped from roughly 20,200 to about 65,500. That is a 300 percent increase, and it is what gave fishery managers cover to open a 2026 season at all. The 2026 escapement target is 188,328 fish, with a 52 percent maximum exploitation rate.
None of that guarantees a 2027 fishery. Salmon are a multi-year animal in a multi-year crisis, and a single good forecast does not undo a generation of habitat loss, water diversion and warming oceans.
For Bodega Bay, the practical question is narrower and more immediate. Can a half-functional commercial season — a handful of days in May, a handful in August, a fall opener that runs out of Half Moon Bay and Monterey, a hard cap and a short market window — keep enough boats, processors and dock services in business to be ready for whatever 2027 brings?
The boats are out. The harbor is moving again. Whether that adds up to a fishery, or just a foothold, is what the rest of the summer will decide.
Down at Spud Point on the May 1 opener, the slips were not exactly full. But they were not empty either. After three years, that counts as something.