California coast

Guides

Short explainers for the parts of the board that decide whether you go, for Del Norte and Humboldt counties, Crescent City to Shelter Cove. Each one links to the agency that owns the facts, and none of them go out of date on a schedule. The live readings are on the board.

• How to read a bar report
  What restricted, closed and unknown mean at Crescent City Harbor and Humboldt Bay, the federal rule behind a restriction, and why some towns have no bar.
• Tsunami: what to do
  Why the shaking is the warning here, how little time a Cascadia earthquake leaves, and the maps worth reading before you need them.
• Shellfish: two departments, two answers
  Why CDFW answers whether a season is open and CDPH answers whether it is safe to eat, what the annual mussel quarantine is, why Dungeness is shut in September, and what CHECK means on a row.
• Ocean fishing seasons, explained
  How CDFW splits this coast in two at 40°10′ N, what OPEN, CLOSED and CHECK are each worth, why coho is a prohibition and not a season, and why the winter groundfish closure does not reach the jetty.
• Small craft advisories and the marine zones
  Which water your town opens onto, what an advisory, gale or hazardous seas warning means, and Humboldt Bay’s own zones.
• Reading a tide table on this coast
  What the zero is measured from, which stations are instruments and which are offsets, and the tide rule on the Lost Coast Trail.
• Road closures on this coast
  What Caltrans publishes and what it does not, why a one-way control is not a closed road, how to read a postmile, and who to ring about a county road.
• Fire: what is burning, and burning debris
  Why this coast has no fire danger level, what CAL FIRE’s incident list is and is not, how to read acres and containment, and the two agencies that decide whether you may burn.
• Beach water: five beaches, and the rest of the coast
  Which five beaches Humboldt samples and when, what the three bacteria and their limits mean, the difference between a warning and a closure, and why nobody samples Del Norte County at all.