Spearfishing Stats

Taxonomy

Rarity

Pacific mackerel are abundant to the point of being ignored. The California Department of Fish and Game once ranked them among the top 11 sport fish in southern California and said so with a shrug, noting that the ranking came from how many there are rather than from how much anyone wanted them. Recreational anglers took more than 1 million of them a year from 1979 through 1981. Party boats alone landed over 1.31 million in 1980. The IUCN lists the species as Least Concern, assessed in 2022, and NOAA Fisheries reports the stock is not overfished, is not subject to overfishing, and sits well above its target population level.

That does not mean the numbers hold steady. Pacific mackerel go through swings that NOAA describes as boom and bust, which is normal for a short-lived fish that reproduces fast, and California has seen both ends of it. The species supported one of the state's major fisheries in the 1930s and 1940s, collapsed badly enough that the fishery was shut down in 1970, and came back strongly enough in the late 1970s to reopen under quota. Reproductive success cycles on a period of roughly 3 to 7 years, so a diver who sees mackerel everywhere one summer and none the next is seeing something the fish has always done.

Regulations

CDFW rules verified 2026-09-06

Seasonality

Edibility

Location

Pacific mackerel live in temperate and subtropical coastal water worldwide. In the eastern Pacific the range runs from Chile to the Gulf of Alaska and into the Gulf of California, and the fish are common from Monterey Bay south to Cape San Lucas in Baja California. Abundance is concentrated south of Point Conception, Santa Barbara, which puts the center of the population squarely over the Southern California Bight. Most fish stay within 20 miles of shore, though the species has been taken as far as 250 miles out. Adults hold anywhere from the surface down to about 1,000 feet, in water between 50 and 72 degrees.

There are 2 movements that matter for anyone in the water. The first is seasonal depth. Off California the population shifts inshore from July through November and back offshore from March through May, so summer and fall are when mackerel are close enough to a beach or a kelp bed to matter. The second is the northward push in summer, which reaches farthest during El Niño years. Adults tend to hold near shallow banks. The fish a diver actually meets in a kelp forest are usually juveniles, which are documented off sandy beaches, around kelp beds, and inside open bays.

Spawning happens well away from all of that. Off California the season runs from late April through July, at depths down to 300 feet, and the eggs go out from Eureka south to the tip of Baja California, anywhere from 2 to 200 miles offshore. An individual fish spawns 8 times or more in a year and releases at least 68,000 eggs each time. There are 3 separate spawning stocks in the northeastern Pacific, 1 in the Gulf of California, 1 near Cape San Lucas, and 1 along the outer Baja California coast north of Punta Abreojos.

Spearfishing Brief

Mackerel are a fish a diver takes on the way to something else, or takes deliberately and gets more out of than expected. The search rates a 2. When mackerel are around they arrive as a wall of fish, silver and barred, moving fast through open water, and nothing about spotting them is subtle. The catch is that presence is seasonal. The schools are inshore from July through November and offshore in spring, so half the year a diver on a southern California beach will not see one.

The shot rates a 3, and the reason is speed. Pacific mackerel are built like small tuna, which is what they are, and they do not stop moving. There is no structure to pin one against and no pause to shoot into. The fish is also small, usually 10 to 16 inches and half a pound to 2 pounds, and its body is soft, so a marginal hit tears out. The standard answer is a modified pole spear or a short speargun, chosen for how fast it comes onto a target rather than for range. Overall difficulty is 3, driven by the shot.

The second reason to shoot mackerel is what they attract. This is one of the best live baits on the coast for yellowtail, white seabass and large halibut, which is a fact anglers have relied on for a century. Bluewater divers hunting tuna use them differently, freezing oily fish such as mackerel and sardine into blocks and hanging them over the side in a mesh bag so the melt trails oil and small particles down the current. A mackerel school is also a reason for larger predators to be in the area, and a diver who finds one has found the bottom of a food chain that runs up through yellowtail and bluefin tuna.

On the plate, mackerel divide people, and the split comes down to handling rather than to the fish. The meat is firm, oily and dark red, with a strong flavor and a high omega-3 content, which is the opposite of the mild white fillet most California divers are used to. It also spoils faster than almost anything else that comes out of this water. Fish that is bled and gutted right after the shot and then iced hard is very good grilled or smoked. Fish that sits in a warm boat for 2 hours is not, and that single difference is responsible for most of the species' bad reputation. Commercially, most Pacific mackerel is canned or turned into pet food, with a small and growing share sold fresh.

Deep Dive

The Pacific mackerel is a tuna that stayed small. It sits in the same family as bluefin, yellowfin and bonito, and it carries the same equipment: a streamlined body, a stiff crescent tail, and the row of small separate finlets along the back and belly ahead of the tail that mark the family. What it does not have is the size or the heat. Bluefin can warm their bodies above the surrounding water. Mackerel run at sea temperature, live fast, and die young.

Fast and young is the whole life history. Some Pacific mackerel are sexually mature at 1 year and most by age 2 or 3. Fish enter the commercial catch in their first year of life. The oldest ever aged in California was 12 years, counted from the growth rings in the ear bones, but most fish in a commercial catch are under 4 years old, and natural mortality is estimated near 40 percent per year even with no fishing at all. Growth is unusual in that it depends on how crowded the population is. When numbers are low, individual fish reach much heavier weights at the same age, which means the biggest mackerel in California history were probably swimming during the lean years. The largest ever recorded was 24.8 inches and 6.4 pounds, against a commercial fish that seldom exceeds 16 inches and 2 pounds.

The California fishery is a full boom-and-bust story with a cannery in the middle of it. Canning of Pacific mackerel started in the late 1920s and grew as processors built capacity. Landings hit 73,214 tons in 1935, second in the state only to Pacific sardine, and the same purse seine boats fished both species. Then came the long decline. By 1970 the stock had collapsed and the fishery was closed outright. Legislation in 1972 tied any future landings to a quota based on the biomass of fish age 1 and older, and a run of strong year classes late in the decade brought the population back far enough to reopen the fishery in 1977. Through the 1990s Pacific mackerel ranked 3rd by volume among all California finfish landings. Management moved from the state to the Pacific Fishery Management Council in January 2000, and the species is now 1 of 5 coastal pelagic species covered by a single federal plan, with the Council setting harvest limits every other June.

There is a detail in that history worth pausing on. During the commercial closure in the 1970s, the sport fishery became the largest source of mackerel removals in California. That is unusual. For most species the commercial catch dwarfs the recreational one by orders of magnitude, and it only flipped here because so many people were catching mackerel off piers and party boats without thinking of it as fishing for mackerel at all.

What the fish eats explains where it fits. Larvae start on copepods, which are tiny crustaceans, and on each other, and they begin feeding within 50 hours of hatching. Adults take small fish, fish larvae, squid, and krill. That diet puts the mackerel in the middle of the food web rather than the top, eating the small drifting animals and being eaten in turn by nearly everything larger. It is also why the species matters to a diver who has no interest in taking one. A mackerel school is a moving concentration of food, and the animals that follow it are the ones most divers are actually hoping to see.

All of this produces one legal quirk. California defines a group called pelagic finfish, which includes Pacific mackerel along with anchovy, sardine, barracuda, bonito, yellowtail, several sharks and the tunas. That definition is the key to several Marine Protected Areas along the coast where every other kind of take is prohibited but pelagic finfish may still be taken by hook and line or by spear. Inside those boundaries, a mackerel is one of the few things that can legally come out of the water.

Where to Find Them

Beaches whose habitats match this species

Matched by habitat: a beach is listed when its biome tags overlap this species' biomes.