The commercial salmon season opens Sunday at midnight, and fishermen are facing a season a little over half as long as last year’s. Meanwhile fishermen are facing much higher gas prices and longer distances from Pillar Point Harbor to open fishing areas. The short season has been blamed by the California Department of Fish and Game on the Bush administrations decision to give water normally reserved for rivers to Klamath Reclamation Project farmers, according to the Oakland Tribune.

Matt Kapko, news writer for the Half Moon Bay Review, is leaving after less than a year on the paper.  His last day is Friday.  Matt’s byline first appeared in the Review in June of last year.  Matt wrote seven of the fourteen bylined stories in the news section of Wednesday’s Review.

Matt’s going to work for Bay City News, a news service based in San Francisco.  BCN’s reports are often used by local television stations. “We’re really going to miss him,” Review managing editor Clay Lambert told me.

Spring has brought Sweet Peas Organic Produce back to Montara.  Their stand re-opened for the season a few weeks ago with new signs, a park bench, a sandbox for the kids, and a renovated stand.

There’s a new owner, Kerry Tate, who bought the stand from Noreen Hacker who had it for ten years.

We stopped by last Sunday afternoon and chatted with Kerry and bought a big bag of fruit and vegetables.  We got to try some delightful apples, daikon radish, blood oranges, and other produce that they were sampling. Our three-year-old loved the apples we bought, much more than the ones we’ve been getting at the supermarket. And she loved Sweet Peas’ sandbox as well.

In addition to food that tastes like food, when you shop Sweet Peas or Cunha’s market, instead of the supermarket, you get a different kind of experience.  It took me too long to realize that the phony choices that you get in a supermarket (Sixteen kinds of toothpaste! Eight kinds of Oreos!) make shopping an ordeal that requires too much time and energy.  I come out feeling tired and frayed. I feel happy and refreshed when I leave Cunha’s or Sweat Peas. And more of your money stays here on the Coastside.

Kerry says that more local produce will show up in a couple of weeks, and that a couple of weeks after that the stone fruits will begin to appear, and tomatoes are just around the corner as well.

Sweet Peas is located on Highway 1 in Montara. They’re open Thursday through Sunday from 1pm to 7pm.

I just got an email from Jo Dee Massanari, the proprietor of La Di Da. Apparently there’s a rumor going around that the cafe is closing, and she asked me to reassure everyone that they’re open as usual while the cafe on the market. Last time I was there, it looked pretty lively to me. Now might be a good time to stop by, say hello, and impress any prospective buyers.

Everything was 50 percent off at Coastside Sports yesterday. It was also their last day of business.

I stopped by an hour before closing, unhappy to see the loss of another business serving Coastsiders. Owner Lisa Garcia looked happier than I did. She and her husband Robert will have more time to focus on their design firm Harvey + Garcia Graphic Design.  The design business is doing well now that the economy is picking up. “It’s great to have a real life and see the kids,” she added. The Garcias will continue to operate their online store.

Lisa attributed the store’s problems to a combination of the small population of the Coastside, and their own inability to compete with the vast selections and low prices at big box retailers over the hill.

“There were some people that didn’t care as much about price and would shop on the coast no matter what,” said Garcia. All I know is that when my son was in Little League, they gave me the kind of help that I’ve come to expect from local businesses. But the writing was literally on the wall. The “For Lease” signs went up weeks ago. Understandably, Robert Garcia declined to talk to me when I called after seeing the signs.

When I entered the store, on their last hour of business, they took one look at my notebook and camera and asked, “Are you from the Review?” No one from the Review had come by in their final days.  “I think it’s because we never advertised with them very much,” said Garcia. “They did do a story about us when we opened.”

“I didn’t hear about it till Friday,” wrote Clay Lambert, Managing Editor of the Review, in response to an emailed question about why the Review hadn’t written about the closing.

I hope we see something from the Review on Wednesday. We need a conversation about how to make the Coastside economy work for locals as well as daytrippers for Burlingame, and to do it in a way that supports our downtown areas instead of strip malls and KFC’s on the highway.

This year’s salmon season, supposed to the one of the best in many years, is looking like a bust. In Half Moon Bay, 65 recreational fishermen on charter boats caught just six fish, and the catches are similarly disappointing all along the coast.

There are lots of theories why things are so bad.  The most disturbing one is that a die-off caused by the allocation of water to farmers on the Klamath River, despite a drought, is continuing to impact the fishery. It may simply be overfished. This could result in a shortened commercial season this year.

La Di Da Jazz Cafe is for sale. I first heard about this from a posting on Half Moon Bay Online, who had a link to the ad on Craigslist.  I confirmed this in an email conversation with proprietor Jo Dee Massanari. I’m really sorry to hear the news. This is my favorite place to hang out during the day Half Moon Bay, especially after dropping my daughter off at Cunha. I hope the new owners are able to keep the same spirit and atmosphere that have made it such a fixture in the community.

Local and state legislators are looking at setting limits on the number of crab traps a fishing boat can carry to 250. The goal is to keep the crab season from coming to an early end when the supply of crabs is depleated.  Lately, big boats with more than 1,000 traps have swooped into the crab fishery, ending the season practically overnight.

I just found out about Half Moon Bay Online, a new blog from Christopher Carfi, who’s a longtime business blogger at The Social Customer Manifesto. His blog has some good coverage of Cypress Cove, where he lives.

The county’s enforcement of its billboard ordinances on Highway 92 outside of Half Moon Bay has begun to show some effects.

The sign on the Berta property promoting Rogue Chefs, and the sign on Cozzolino’s promoting Spyglass have been removed. The enforcement also targeted one more community-oriented billboard. The Coastal Repertory Theatre sign on Highway 92 was removed after the property owner was notified. The huge sign added over the Presidents’ Day Weekend, which prompted our original call to the County, has been painted over.

According to Jim Eggemeyer, Interim Planning Adminstrator at the San Mateo County Planning Department, three or four other property owners have been been mailed notification that the signs on their property are in violation, but the county has not yet received the receipts from the postal service.