California coast

Guides

Short explainers for the parts of the board that decide whether you go, for every California county board, Fort Dick to Imperial Beach. Each one links to the agency that owns the facts, and none of them go out of date on a schedule.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, Humboldt Bay, the Noyo River and Morro Bay, the federal rule behind a restriction, and why most of this coast has no bar report.
• Tsunami: what to do
  Why the shaking is the warning everywhere on this coast, how little time a nearby earthquake leaves, the state’s hazard maps, and your county’s alerts.
• 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
  Which of CDFW’s management areas each town fishes, from Fort Dick to Imperial Beach, 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 and which of five weather offices forecasts it, what an advisory, gale or hazardous seas warning means, and the bay zones.
• Reading a tide table on this coast
  What the zero is measured from, which stations are instruments and which are offsets, which water runs late inside the bays, and the tide rule on the Lost Coast Trail.
• Road closures on this coast
  Which Caltrans district and which roads each board reads, what Caltrans publishes and what it does not, why a one-way control is not a closed road, how to read a postmile, and the highway cameras.
• Fire: what is burning, and burning debris
  Why CAL FIRE publishes no fire danger level for these counties, what its incident list is and is not, how to read acres and containment, and which air district decides whether you may burn.
• Beach water: who samples what, and the beaches nobody does
  Which beaches each county samples and which nobody does, what the bacteria and their limits mean, the difference between a warning and a closure, and why nobody samples Del Norte County at all.