Guide

Shellfish: two departments, two answers

Checked September 24, 2026 against the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Public Health.

On this coast, two departments have to agree before you eat what you dug, and they answer different questions on different pages. The tile keeps them apart on purpose, because the commonest way to get this wrong is to read one of them as if it were both.

An open season is not a clean bill of health, and a lifted health warning does not open a season. Both have to say yes.

Why the tile is read by area and by county

The two departments do not divide the coast the same way, and that is the single most important thing on this page. CDFW sets seasons by area, and it cuts this coast four times: the Northern area runs from the Oregon border to 40°10′ N near Cape Mendocino, the Mendocino area from there to 38°57.5′ N at Point Arena, the San Francisco area from there to 37°11′ N at Pigeon Point, the Central area from there to 34°27′ N at Point Conception, and the Southern area below that to the border — so Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties are one CDFW area and three CDPH counties, and Santa Barbara County is split by a latitude: Gaviota, just north of 34°27′, reads Central and Goleta, ten miles east on the same channel, reads Southern. CDPH warns by county. Mendocino County straddles two CDFW areas, so no answer given per county could be right at both ends of it.

Every town is therefore answered twice over: on the CDFW area its own water sits in, and on the county it stands in. Fort Bragg reads the Mendocino area; Point Arena and Gualala, nine and twenty-two miles further south, read the San Francisco area and get different answers from it. The two departments can and do disagree, and where they do, the stricter one is what the tile shows.

They disagree right now. The razor clam fishery has been shut in Humboldt since May 2, 2024 for domoic acid, and it is open in Del Norte, where CDPH lifted the last warning on August 31, 2026. Twenty miles of coast apart, opposite answers.

The annual mussel quarantine

Every year CDPH quarantines sport-harvested mussels along the entire California coast, Oregon border to Mexican border, bays, inlets and harbours included. It normally runs May 1 through October 31, and CDPH can start it early or extend it. It covers only sport-harvested mussels: commercially grown mussels from certified companies are tested and are not part of it.

CDFW’s own regulations put it plainly while the quarantine stands: mussels should only be collected for non-consumptive uses, such as bait.

There is no way to tell by looking. The toxins do not change how a shellfish looks, smells or behaves, and cooking does not reliably destroy them.

Crab: which crab, and why it is shut in September

The crab row means Dungeness, because on this coast that is what the word means. Its closure is not a toxin closure at all — it is the season. Dungeness closed on July 31, 2026 and is scheduled to reopen on November 7, 2026.

That distinction is the reason this tile reads CDFW’s regulations page rather than their health advisories page. The advisories page is a list of toxin closures, and in September it said nothing about Dungeness crab whatever — because there is nothing toxic about it. A tile built on that page alone would have sent somebody crabbing eleven weeks early.

Rock crab is a different animal with a different answer. Its season is open. But CDPH warns against eating the viscera — the internal organs, the “butter” or “guts” — of rock crab taken anywhere from the California/Oregon border down to the Mendocino–Sonoma county line, which is the whole Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino coast. Clean crab before cooking. The tile carries that line beside the Dungeness answer rather than letting one crab stand in for both.

What CHECK means on this tile

Three words appear on a California shellfish row, and the third one is the honest one.

• CLOSED — CDFW has the season shut, or CDPH has a warning in force for your county, or both.
• OPEN — CDFW has the season open in your town’s own area and CDPH has no warning in force for your county. It is still not advice to eat anything: ring the line below.
• CHECK — nobody has told us this is shut, and this tile cannot tell you it is open. It appears on mussels outside the quarantine months, and on any species the pages stopped answering for.

The tile reads CDPH’s notifications for the current year, which is how CDPH publishes them — this year in a table, earlier years as prose underneath. So an advisory standing since an earlier year may not be on the tile. That is exactly why a missing warning here leaves a row quiet instead of turning it green, and why the phone number below is on the tile at full size.

How this reading is dated

Neither page stamps itself. So the tile is dated by CDPH’s newest notification — a real published date, from the department whose job it is to publish when something changes. The trade is that a genuinely quiet fortnight, with nothing to announce, reads as out of date. When that happens the tile says so in as many words rather than going quiet, and sends you to the line.

Who to ring

Sources

• CDFW, Northern area ocean sport fishing regulations — the seasons Del Norte and most of Humboldt read
• CDFW, Mendocino area — Cape Mendocino to Point Arena: Shelter Cove, and Westport down to Elk
• CDFW, San Francisco area — Point Arena to Pigeon Point: Point Arena and Gualala, the Sonoma and Marin coast, the city and San Mateo
• CDFW, Central area — Pigeon Point to Point Conception: Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties, and Gaviota
• CDFW, Southern area — Point Conception to the border: Goleta to Carpinteria, the Ventura coast, Los Angeles County with Catalina, the Orange coast, and San Diego County to the border
• CDPH shellfish and seafood advisories — the warnings the tile reads
• CDFW health advisories and closures — the whole state’s toxin picture
• CDPH annual mussel quarantine
• CDPH recreational bivalve shellfish advisory map