California and Shark Stewards Try to Ban Shark Fishing as We Know It

On June 17, 2026, the California Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to approve an emergency regulation banning wire leader and hooks over 1.5 inches for anyone fishing the ocean from Pigeon Point south, essentially the entire Southern and Central California coast. No public hearing process. No real opportunity for the thousands of anglers it affects to weigh in before the vote. Just a unanimous yes, and a five-day clock for the public to respond after the fact.

The stated goal is to reduce white shark interactions. It’s clear that the group who passed this has zero first-hand knowledge of the fishery and what they’re actually doing. This regulation does almost nothing to address that problem while doing real, measurable harm to a sustainable fishery that has nothing to do with the problem.

I want to walk through exactly what’s happening here, why the math doesn’t add up, and what you can still do about it before the window closes.

What the Regulation Actually Does

The new rule prohibits wire or metallic leader and hooks larger than 1.5 inches in inside measurement when fishing in ocean waters from Pigeon Point south. That’s not a narrow, surgical fix aimed at the handful of people illegally targeting white sharks. That’s a blanket restriction on gear used by every angler targeting any shark species along most of the California coast.

Leopard sharks. Soupfin sharks. Sevengill sharks. Threshers. Makos. None of these are white sharks. None of these are the problem this regulation claims to solve. All of them are now caught under the same gear restriction as if they were.

The Math They’re Not Doing

Here’s the justification, in their own words: Shark Stewards has documented anglers illegally targeting more than 30 white sharks in Southern California. That’s the number driving a coastwide gear ban.

I want you to sit with that number for a second, because I don’t think the Commission did.

I am one angler. In a typical year I hook somewhere around 50 leopard sharks from the surf. In a strong year, I’ve topped 100. I am one of thousands of recreational surf anglers fishing this coast, season after season, doing exactly what California’s constitution says we have the right to do: fish.

If wire leader disappears, here’s what happens to a meaningful share of those leopard sharks, soupfins, and sevengills hooked by me and every other angler like me. They don’t get landed cleanly, unhooked, and released the way they do now. They get fought on a leader material that their abrasive skin shreds through, and they swim off with a hook and a length of monofilament line still attached. That fish doesn’t disappear from the ecosystem unaffected. It carries that gear with it, sometimes for the rest of its life.

Now multiply that by every angler on this coast targeting these species, for every season this regulation stays in effect. The Commission is trading a documented 30 illegal white shark interactions against an uncounted, unexamined number of leopard sharks, soupfins, sevengills, threshers, makos and more species that will now be hooked and lost rather than hooked and safely released. Nobody on the Commission appears to have done that math. I just did it for them, using nothing but my own personal catch numbers.

The Hook Size Rule Makes This Worse, Not Better

There’s a second piece of this regulation that’s gotten less attention and deserves more: the 1.5-inch maximum hook size.

I fish 7/0 to 9/0 circle hooks for leopard sharks and soupfins. Those hooks are smaller than the new limit, so on paper I’m fine. But anglers targeting sevengill sharks, threshers, makos, and other larger species of fish that require larger gear because of their size and the way they feed, are now being pushed toward smaller hooks than what’s appropriate for those species.

Here’s why that matters. A properly sized circle hook is designed to find the corner of a fish’s mouth almost every time, a clean hookset that’s easy to remove and minimizes injury to the fish and risk to the angler. Force an angler onto undersized gear for the species they’re actually targeting, and you increase the odds of a deep hook, a swallowed hook, gut hooking, the exact kind of injury circle hooks were popularized to prevent in the first place. A regulation sold as protecting sharks is, in this specific provision, making injury more likely for the sharks and anglers.

That’s not a side effect. That’s the direct, foreseeable result of the rule as written.

This Was Never About Leopard Sharks

To be clear about who’s behind this: the regulation was pushed primarily by Shark Stewards, an advocacy organization, with support from a handful of other groups. Even Shark Stewards’ own public statements acknowledge the Commission didn’t adopt everything they asked for, they also wanted chum and live bait banned and drone-assisted baiting prohibited. Those requests got denied. The wire leader and hook size restriction got approved.

What that tells you is this was never a careful, narrowly tailored response built around the actual mechanics of white shark interactions. It was a broad gear ban, aimed at a problem affecting a tiny fraction of anglers, applied to every angler on the coast targeting any shark species, passed in five days with almost no opportunity for the people actually affected to be heard before the vote happened.

Our Right to Fish Is Not Optional

California’s constitution guarantees the people the right to fish. That right isn’t unlimited, the state can and does regulate fishing for genuine conservation and safety reasons, and that authority is legitimate. But that authority comes with a responsibility to use it carefully, to weigh real costs against real benefits, and to target the actual problem instead of sweeping up everyone in reach because it’s administratively easier than doing the harder work of writing a narrower rule.

That responsibility wasn’t met here. A documented problem involving a small number of people illegally targeting one species turned into a blanket restriction on gear used by a sustainable, long-running, catch-and-release fishery that has no meaningful overlap with that problem. That’s not careful regulation. That’s overreach, dressed up as conservation, and it sets a precedent that should concern every angler in this state regardless of what species you target.

What You Can Still Do

This emergency regulation has already been adopted by the Commission. It’s headed to the Office of Administrative Law for final review. There is a narrow public comment window before that review closes, and it matters more than you might think, both for this specific action and for the record it creates if this comes up for permanent rulemaking later this year.

Here’s exactly what to do, and it takes about five minutes:

Send an email to both of these addresses:

• staff@oal.ca.gov
• fgc@fgc.ca.gov

Subject line: Emergency Regulations: Recreational Gear Restrictions for White Shark

In the body, include:

• What species you fish for and roughly how often
• Why wire leader matters for landing those species safely and cleanly, rather than losing fish with trailing gear
• Your name and that you’re a California resident

Keep it factual. Keep it personal. Share your actual numbers, your actual experience. That’s what makes these comments hard to dismiss.

The deadline is tight. Comments are due within five calendar days of the Commission’s submittal to OAL, expected around June 25. That puts the real deadline right around June 30. Don’t wait on this.

If you fish this coast, for any species, this affects you. Not because your specific target species is named in this rule, but because of what it represents: a regulatory body deciding that a documented problem affecting a few dozen incidents justifies a blanket restriction on an entire fishery, passed in five days, with almost no room for the people affected to be heard first.

Send the email. Share this with another angler. The window is short, but it’s not closed yet.

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Have questions about how this affects your specific setup or species? Drop a comment below or reach out directly. I’ll keep this post updated as the situation develops.