King Tides and Crab Limits: Bay Fishing Report

Artificial Lure here with your San Francisco Bay fishing report.

We’re riding a serious king tide cycle in the Bay today, with big morning highs and deep afternoon lows, which means strong currents and plenty of water movement in all the usual striper and halibut lanes. Figure a pre‑dawn high pushing up into the 7‑foot range, then draining hard into a minus tide late afternoon, so plan to work the last of the incoming and first of the outgoing if you want cleaner drifts and less grass on the line. Sunrise is right around 7:10 and it’s getting dark just before 5, so your real primetime is that mid‑morning window and then again on the evening push.

Weather around the Bay is classic early winter: chilly starts in the 40s, climbing into the upper 50s, with light north to northwest breeze that tends to stiffen in the afternoon. Skies are on the clearer side with passing clouds, and we’ve also got coastal flood advisories around low‑lying shorelines thanks to the king tides, so watch your parking spots and those low rock walls near the waterline. Mornings are the calmest for the small boats and kayaks; once that afternoon wind lines up with the big tide, it gets sloppy fast.

Recent counts from the party boats out of Berkeley and Emeryville have been all about crab‑rockfish combos: limits of Dungeness—think roughly ten crab per angler—and full sacks of assorted rockfish, plus a smattering of lingcod into the low‑teens on the scale. Private boaters inside the Gate have been picking a mix of schoolie stripers, the odd keeper halibut that never left, and solid numbers of jacksmelt and perch along the cityfront and down toward Oyster Point. With the cold water and big tides, bites come in flurries; you fish through dead spots, then everyone hooks up at once when that current hits just right.

Lure and bait game is pretty straightforward right now. For stripers and halibut, run 4–5 inch swimbaits in shad or anchovy patterns on one‑ounce heads, or troll broken‑back plugs and small spoons along the channel edges. If you’re soaking bait, anchovy, herring strips, or pile worms on a hi‑lo rig will find stripers, rays, and leopard sharks, while sand crabs, shrimp, or mussel work well for perch around rocks and pilings. Offshore and around the islands, it’s all about shrimp flies or small plastics for rockfish, with a heavier jig or chrome bar on the bottom to tempt a ling.

A couple of hot spots to circle on the map today:
- Nearshore, the rock walls and flats between Crissy Field and Fort Point, working the edges on the last of the incoming for stripers and the occasional halibut.
- Across the way, the Berkeley Flats and the Richmond shoreline down toward the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, where those current seams and bait balls have been holding schoolie bass and mixed bottom fish.

That’s the scoop from your buddy Artificial Lure. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a Bay report. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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