In Reply to: Re: Have gas prices affected your diving? posted by Captaintim on June 01, 2008 at 22:12:36:

Feel a bit lucky when I tell you that all the fishing charter boats up here are pretty much dead in the water.
Number one, Salmon season got shut down this year for the first time in history and it looks like it will never come back, they've closed rockfish for half the year for hook and line, and whale watching trips are a big looser when you only get a handfull of people who will only pay $25 a piece and you have to run miles out and all over to find whales and burn hundreds of gallons of fuel. Rumors are that they are closing the entire North Coast to all near shore fishing (We'll know by next year),
and nobody is going to pay $100 for a fishing trip to go and pull crab pots for a crab or two.

I've tried many times to offer my help and advice for whatever it was worth to steer the captains towards diving but between the the lack of knowledge about running a dive boat, the cost of liability insurance, and only about 100 days of diviable conditions annually there's no way they would do it.

I'll bet we'll see every charter boat in Bodega Bay up for sale by the end of this year. That's my prediction.

At least you guys are still running.