Sturgeon Fishing in San Francisco Bay: Where the Fishery Actually Is

Three bays, one search term

CDFW defines the San Francisco Bay District as San Francisco and San Pablo bays plus all their tidal bays and the tidal portions of their rivers and streams — in the Department's own words, the sloughs and estuaries between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Carquinez Bridge. Read that twice, because it settles the confusion: San Pablo Bay legally is San Francisco Bay. Cross under the Carquinez Bridge and you leave the district and pick up the inland rule book instead.

That one boundary is why a guide can advertise the same winter trip as San Francisco Bay sturgeon fishing, San Pablo Bay sturgeon fishing or Suisun Bay sturgeon fishing without any of the three being wrong. It is also why the phrase tells you almost nothing useful about where you will be anchored. The three names describe three pieces of water with different depths, different weather and different launch points, and a captain chooses between them week to week based on where the salinity line and the bait are sitting.

If you are booking a trip, the practical translation is short. You are not fishing under the Golden Gate. You are most likely anchored in 10 to 25 feet of water somewhere between China Camp and Pittsburg, a long way from the postcard.

CDFW's own report card splits this estuary 26 ways

The cleanest proof that "San Francisco Bay" is too coarse a label comes from the state's own paperwork. Every angler fishing for white sturgeon has to carry a Sturgeon Fishing Report Card and log each fish against a numbered location code. CDFW's card divides the Sacramento–San Joaquin system and the coast into 26 codes, and only two of them are named San Francisco Bay — codes 20 and 21, split at Highway 80, which is the Bay Bridge.

The water anglers mean when they say Bay sturgeon fishing is codes 16 through 19, plus the tributary codes that feed them. Here is the Bay and lower-estuary portion of the list, verbatim from CDFW's report card page.

• Codes 16 to 19 are where a Bay sturgeon trip almost always happens.
• Codes 20 and 21 are the only two the state calls San Francisco Bay — and code 20 is most of what the winter closure shuts.
• Codes 9, 10 and 11 are the tributaries a guide slides into when wind or runoff makes the open bay unfishable.
• The card is required whether or not you catch anything, and it is the reason this breakdown exists at all.

San Pablo Bay: the shallow bay that carries the fishery

Go north under the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and the estuary opens into San Pablo Bay — wide, exposed and shallow. Most of the sturgeon fishing here happens in roughly 10 to 20 feet of water, which is why anglers here talk about depth lines rather than structure. The long-standing name for the productive ground is the Sturgeon Triangle, and the reference points around it are the Napa River and Sonoma Creek mouths on the north shore and the Marin shoreline running down past China Camp.

It is an anchor-and-wait fishery, start to finish. The boat sets on a tide line, the rods go out with heavy sliding-sinker rigs, bait soaks on the bottom, and everyone watches rod tips. A regional report for the week of September 3, 2026 put it plainly: sturgeon were being caught in San Pablo Bay and Suisun Bay by the anchor-and-wait crowd, while the striped bass fleet was running anchovy schools off the Berkeley flats and the Brothers. Two completely different days on the same bay.

Shallow and open is also the catch. San Pablo Bay builds a short, hard chop in an afternoon westerly faster than almost any water on this site, and a winter storm front can take a planned trip off the board with a day's notice. Guides work the morning tide and keep the schedule loose for exactly that reason.

Carquinez Strait and Suisun Bay: where the winter fishery moves

At the east end of San Pablo Bay the estuary pinches down into the Carquinez Strait, a deep, fast channel running between Vallejo and Benicia on the north side and Crockett and Martinez on the south. Above the Strait it opens again into Suisun Bay and, off to the north, Grizzly Bay. These are the codes 17, 18 and 19 waters, and they are the classic winter address.

The movement is driven by fresh water. CDFW records that adult white sturgeon begin migrating out of the estuary and into the river system in December and spawn from February into June, after which they drop back to the Delta. Put that alongside the seasonal reality that storm runoff pushes the salinity line west and the pattern most Bay guides fish makes sense: effort starts in San Pablo Bay in the fall, slides east into the Strait and Suisun as the rains arrive, and thins out as fish commit to the rivers in late winter.

One honest warning about self-launching up here. A Contra Costa County civil grand jury report found that accumulated sediment from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers restricts the navigable depth of Martinez Marina and has rendered some slips unusable, a problem the report says is made worse by the marina sitting right where the Carquinez Strait narrows. That is the same sediment load that makes this good sturgeon ground. If you are trailering your own boat, confirm the ramp before you commit to it; if you are booking a guide, let them pick the launch.

• Fall: effort centers on San Pablo Bay and the lower Napa River.
• After the first real storms: the Carquinez Strait and Suisun Bay take over.
• Late winter: fish begin committing upriver to spawn, and the Delta codes get busier.
• Tackle note: east of the I-680 Benicia–Martinez Bridge there is a hook-gap limit that catches people out — the regulations guide has the detail.

The central Bay closure: January 1 through March 15

This is the single most important thing a visiting angler does not know. From January 1 through March 15 every year, neither white nor green sturgeon may be taken from a defined block of central San Francisco Bay. CDFW calls it the long-standing area closure, and Title 14 describes it with three lines rather than a map you can pace off: a direct line between Point Chauncy — the National Marine Fisheries laboratory site on the Marin shore — and Point Richmond; the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge; and a direct line from Point Lobos to Point Bonita.

Lay that over a chart and it is the whole central Bay: Angel Island, Alcatraz, Raccoon Strait, Richardson Bay, the Berkeley and Emeryville flats, and the water out to the Golden Gate. Closed for ten and a half weeks, and those ten and a half weeks are the deepest part of winter.

Why those dates? The closure window sits directly on top of the Pacific herring spawn. Herring come into the Bay's shallows to lay eggs roughly between December and March — Richardson Bay near Sausalito is a recurring spawn site — and CDFW's own Pacific herring assessment lists sturgeon among the predators that feed on adult herring and their embryos in San Francisco Bay. Local reports have described the closure for years as protecting sturgeon while a spawn concentrates them in a small area. We have not found CDFW stating that rationale in the current regulation text, so treat the reason as the accepted local explanation and the dates as the law.

Now the good news, and it is why this closure gets so little attention from the people who actually fish here: San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait, Suisun Bay, Grizzly Bay and the Delta all stay open straight through it. The closure removes the water almost nobody was targeting sturgeon in anyway. It matters if you were planning to fish a central Bay pier, work the city shoreline, or anchor off Angel Island in February — and it matters not at all to a guide running out of San Rafael or Benicia.

• Closed January 1 to March 15: the central Bay inside the Point Chauncy–Point Richmond line, the Bay Bridge, and the Point Lobos–Point Bonita line.
• Open all winter: San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait, Suisun Bay, Grizzly Bay, Montezuma Slough, the Napa and Petaluma rivers, and the Delta.
• The closure covers both white and green sturgeon, and green sturgeon may not be taken anywhere at any time.
• March 16 is the reopening date — the only calendar event in this fishery that changes where you can legally anchor.

The season, month by month

The 2026-27 white sturgeon season runs October 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027. Inside the Bay District that is nine months of open season with one closed area dropped into the middle of it. The table below is a planning calendar for where the effort goes, not a regulations summary — for the actual rules, limits and inland date exceptions, use the regulations guide.

• Peak is the storm season: the first serious rains and the biggest tide swings of winter.
• A hard outgoing tide is the classic window, which is why trip times follow the tide book rather than the clock.
• Late spring trips exist, but by May most Bay six-pack boats are looking at halibut and stripers.
• There is no legal sturgeon fishing anywhere in California between July 1 and September 30.

Why no Bay party boat sells a sturgeon trip

Emeryville and Berkeley sit directly on the water this search term describes, and between them they are one of the busiest sportfishing complexes in Northern California. Neither sells a sturgeon trip. Check the Emeryville board on any November day and you get the same answer: on November 8, 2026 it was five boats, 96 anglers, 937 Dungeness crab and 763 rockfish, and every single trip was a full day run out through the Golden Gate to the coast.

The reason is boat economics, not fish. A party boat needs twenty to thirty paying anglers spread around a rail, all able to fish at once, all with a reasonable shot at a sack of fillets. Sturgeon fishing is the opposite animal: a handful of heavy rods set on one specific tide line, one single barbless hook per line, long quiet stretches at anchor, and a fish that by law goes back in the water. You cannot fill a 60-foot boat with that, and the landings have never tried.

So the Bay sturgeon fleet is six-pack guide boats — up to six anglers with a licensed captain who supplies the heavy gear, the rigs and the bait, and whose actual product is knowing which tide and which depth line are working this week. That is the trip you are booking, and it is worth understanding before you compare it on price against a rockfish seat out of the same marina.

• Party boats out of Emeryville, Berkeley and San Francisco run coastal rockfish, crab, salmon and halibut — not sturgeon.
• Sturgeon is a six-pack guide fishery across San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait and Suisun.
• The captain supplies heavy rods, sliding-sinker rigs and bait; you bring layers, lunch and your paperwork.
• Six seats means an unsold pair is a third of the boat — exactly the kind of inventory that gets discounted late.

What a Bay sturgeon trip costs

Be ready for less price transparency than you get from the ocean landings on this site. Most Bay and Delta sturgeon guides quote by phone and do not publish a rate card at all, which is normal for a one-boat operation and frustrating if you are trying to budget. The figures below are what was actually listed on the booking platforms for this fishery when we checked, and we have labeled them as listings rather than rates for that reason.

• Compare like with like: a per-person seat and a whole-boat charter are not the same purchase.
• Ask what is included — gear and bait usually are, the license and report card never are.
• Winter trips get canceled for weather, so ask the reschedule policy before you pay a deposit.
• Plan on a tip; on a six-pack it is the captain and often one deckhand doing all the rigging.

A fishery with about 6,500 big fish left in it

There is a reason every sturgeon you touch in this estuary goes back in the water, and it is not a technicality. CDFW fisheries biologists estimate roughly 6,500 white sturgeon between 40 and 60 inches remain in California, down sharply from a previous estimate of about 30,000 fish in that same size range drawn from a 2016 to 2021 survey. That figure was reported in July 2025.

The 2022 harmful algal bloom in San Francisco Bay is part of the story: CDFW's white sturgeon page records that the bloom caused the deaths of at least 691 sturgeon in the Bay that year. The Department has since started trying to pin the population down properly, launching a mark-recapture pilot program in May 2024 that captures white sturgeon throughout the Bay–Delta on anchored setlines, measures and PIT-tags them, and recaptures months later. White sturgeon has been a candidate for listing as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act since July 12, 2024.

What that means on the boat is simple and strict: the daily bag and possession limit is zero, the annual limit is zero, and a fish over 60 inches of fork length may not come out of the water at all. Our regulations guide covers the full list, including the handling rules and the report card. Treat a Bay sturgeon trip as a trophy hunt where the photo and the release are the prize, because that is exactly what the law and the arithmetic have made it.

How to get on a boat this winter

Book the guide and the date, not the ramp. Every captain in this fishery moves between San Pablo Bay, the Strait and Suisun depending on rain, salinity and where bait has shown up, and a guide who tells you in advance exactly where you will anchor in February is guessing. Give them the date and let them pick the water.

Buy your license and your sturgeon report card online before the trip. Unlike an ocean party boat, a six-pack guide generally cannot sell you either one on the water, and the report card is required of anyone fishing for white sturgeon — including children, and including places where no license is otherwise needed. Then dress for an anchored boat in January, which is colder than you think, and bring more layers than you want to carry.

On price, this is the fishery where last-minute seats make the most sense on the whole site. A six-pack guide with two open spots on a prime outgoing tide would rather fill them cheap than run light, and winter weather windows make those openings appear with very little notice. Mixed Bag Sportsman posts those seats as the captains send them in — every deal is submitted by the operator and reviewed before it goes live, and clicking through books you directly with the boat.

• Be flexible on dates — the best tides and the weather windows do not line up with weekends.
• Buy the sport fishing license and the sturgeon report card in advance, online.
• Ask the captain what the plan is if the forecast turns, before you pay.
• Set deal alerts: six-pack open seats on a good winter tide are the fastest-moving inventory we list.