Thumbnail photo courtesy of California Department of Fish and Wildlife Andrea Spahn brought a rare piece of good news to the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors and the Crescent City Harbor District last month — the quillback rockfish is “not even close to being overfished.” New data NOAA scientists presented at the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Stock Assessment Review, or STAR, panel in June may mean local fishermen can pursue rockfish up to 30 fathoms from shore, further than the current 20-fathom boundary they’re limited to, Spahn told Redwood Voice Community News on July 1. The STAR panel must finalize the data and the PFMC still needs to view it, but Spahn was confident that Del Norte anglers would win back what they lost nearly two years ago. “If we hadn’t stood up and fought we probably would still be closed,” Spahn said. Spahn is a member of the Del Norte Fishing group, local fishermen who banded together after the California Department of Fish and Wildlife closed the groundfish fishery from the shore to 50-fathoms or 300-feet, to sea. The reason for the 2023 closure was due to the quillback rockfish catch exceeding the federal over fishing limit of 1.04 metric tons, Caroline McKnight, an environmental scientist with CDFW’s marine region, told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Aug. 15, 2023. Spahn, Crescent City Fishing Charters owner Steve Huber, District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard and other anglers challenged that assertion, saying it was based on outdated data models. They called for hook-and-line surveys rather than relying on trawling data from other areas of the West Coast to decide whether or not the fishery should be closed. On June 24, 2025, Spahn told Del Norte County supervisors that the National Marine Fisheries Service’s recent hook and line surveys showed that the quillback stock was above the level at which a species is considered overfished. “Just a reminder, a fish is considered overfished if [its population] is at 25 percent,” she said. “NOAA has determined that we are at 46 percent, meaning we are not even close to being overfished.” Quillback are prolific off the Del Norte coast, Spahn said, adding that during a recent fishing trip she and her husband caught nine. There are breeding females, mature males and juveniles and there are large fish. Most people don’t even want a quillback rockfish, Spahn said. They don’t have much meat and they’re “really spiny.” When CDFW shut the fishery down in 2023 local anglers couldn’t pursue other species such as the yelloweye rockfish, Spahn said. She argued that scientists need input from fishermen when making their assessments “because we’re out there.” “We know what we see and what’s there,” she said. Following CDFW’s decision, which ultimately extended the closure to include the entire California coastline, Spahn, Huber and the Board of Supervisors aired their concerns before the PFMC. Coinciding with the closure of the salmon season and the Smith River Complex wildfire, Howard told the PFMC in September 2023 that many Del Norters wouldn’t survive not being able to pursue rockfish. “It’s difficult to see such decision-making based on pretty outdated models and fed by limited data to no-data,” he told the Council at a September 2023 meeting. “And for us, that’s difficult to stomach.” Based on data from 2021, which resulted in low federal harvest limits of quillback for 2023 and 2024, and a sudden increase in landings during the summer of 2023, the PFMC upheld the groundfish fishery closure. However, in November 2023, CDFW scientists pointed out that the 2021 stock assessment of the quillback was conducted at a time when a defined California stock didn’t exist. CDFW environmental scientist John Budrick told the Council that a fisheries management plan that was being developed for early 2024 was expected to have quillback stock definitions for California, Oregon and Washington. Burdick questioned if the minimum stock size threshold for determining when a species is overfished would have been the outcome of an assessment that’s limited to the then-newly-defined California quillback rockfish stock. In March 2024, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council restored some of the closed fishing grounds to local anglers and promised to do the hook and line surveys they called for. Later that month, Huber hosted Melissa Monk and other NOAA scientists aboard his vessel. They had spent about two days conducting hook and line surveys of quillback rockfish in Del Norte County waters and were expected to return to gather more data in June 2024 and April 2025. That data would inform new assessments the PFMC is expected to adopt in September 2025. On Thursday Howard told Redwood Voice that he’s hoping to meet with National Marine Fisheries Service officials in Washington D.C. this week to discuss changes he says needs to be made to the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary law that governs fisheries management in federal waters. Howard called the law antiquated and said that if there’s no money funding assessments for the different species it applies to, “we’re going to be screwed.” “And why I say that, the other [species], the China rockfish, we have no information on that, yet it shares the same environment as the quillback,” he said. “And there are several other species that are in the same boat, but we’ve never seen them take a drastic step like they did with the full closure of the fishery like they did with the quillback.” Howard pointed to the yelloweye rockfish, which, he said, is abundant and shares the same environment as a quillback and has been off limits to fishermen for more than a decade. The yelloweye rockfish is a federally designated overfished species, according to CDFW. Spahn said she and other members of the Del Norte Fishing Group are also going to stay involved. One reason is because NOAA is expected to conduct a stock assessment on canary rockfish next year. In Oregon, anglers are only allowed to keep one canary rockfish per day, Spahn said. Yet in California, the bag limit is 10. She said she doesn’t know what is going to happen with the canaries. “It’s not over,” Spahn said. “There will still be things that come up with possibly other fish or depths or fishing seasons, I don’t know. But we’re definitely not going away and we’ve told them. We’ve told PFMC and NOAA that we’ll stay on top of this.”