BRENT RANDOL

Current visibility at Clear Lake is 1-3 feet and water level remains at 2 feet above the Rumsey gauge. The last bass tournament took place last week, so the lake will be fairly quiet for the next few months. Fishing is fair for numbers of largemouth bass, ranging from 8 to 12 fish per trip. As the water cools, anglers are starting to try live minnows. During the winter months, live minnows are far more effective than artificial lures.

At Lake Berryessa, speed trolling optimizers or speedy shiners in various colors are the key to success for limits of Eagle Lake-strain trout as the bait schools continue to rise toward the surface. I would expect the lake to turn over in the next few weeks. A few small king salmon are starting to show up. Bass fishing is best with a reaction bite in the mornings with jigs, senkos, tubes, or plastics. The lake is currently at 77% capacity.

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Rob Russell Fly Fishing reported Putah Creek flows down to 55 cubic feet per second, which is extremely low. He reported a fair bite last week, but you will need to find some quiet water and use some stealth tactics in your approach.

The San Francisco Bay striper and halibut bite remains good, but I expect it to diminish as the rains arrive and the halibut move back into the ocean.

If you are looking for anchovies, J & P Bait at Pier 47 in San Francisco is still open, but only on weekends until the middle of November.

St. Helena’s Jeff Conwell shows his limit of South Dakota ringneck pheasants.

The Dungeness crab season is set to open Nov. 4 in Zone 3, which includes the Bay Area. Commercial season will be delayed again this season due to the entanglement risk. For recreational fishermen, traps will be banned but hoop nets will be allowed. There will be no change in the limit, which is 10 per person per day with a minimum size of 5¾ inches.

Mola tecta found at Point Reyes

On Saturday morning, a surfer happened upon an alien-looking sea creature washed up on Kehoe Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore. It had a nearly 6-foot-long, oblong body with a fin popping out on each side, no tail, and one of its enormous googly eyes faced upward, seemingly saying hello.

Christian Anthony snapped a photo of the specimen and called it a mola mola in a post on the West Marin Feed, a social media account where he posts news and sightings in West Marin.

Turns out the specimen is not a mola mola, but rather a close relative known as a mola tecta, or hoodwinker sunfish. It is an easy mistake to make. Mola tecta are extremely rare in California — so rare that there have been only a handful of living sightings here and about the same number of strandings, according to Marianne Nyegaard, Ph.D., the researcher who first named and documented the species in 2017 while working on research in Bali, Indonesia.

The species more commonly inhabits the oceans off Chile, Australia and New Zealand. But in recent years, the fish have been found both alive and stranded as far north as Alaska, according an email from Nyegaard, a research associate at Auckland Museum.

The first observation of mola tecta in the northern hemisphere occurred in California in 2019, when one washed up at the Coal Oil Point Reserve in Santa Barbara.

“It really was exciting to collect the photos and samples knowing that it could potentially be such an extraordinary sighting,” Jessica Nielsen, a conservation specialist at Coal Oil Point, told UC Santa Barbara’s news magazine the Current at the time. “Mola tecta was just recently discovered, so there is still so much to learn about this species.”

Today in sports history: Nov. 2

1958: Chicago, Los Angeles establish NFL attendance record when 90,833 fill L.A. Coliseum

1958 — Chicago and Los Angeles establish an NFL attendance record when 90,833 fill the L.A. Coliseum to see the Rams beat the Bears 41-35.

AP file

2006: Minnesota’s Niklas Backstrom becomes first goalie in modern era to win twice without starting

2006 — Minnesota’s Niklas Backstrom becomes the first goalie in the modern era, which began in 1943, to win twice without starting. Backstom replaces an ill Manny Fernandez and stops all 19 shots he faces over the final two periods as the Wild rally for a 5-2 victory over Vancouver. Backstrom relieved Fernandez after a three-goal first period against Nashville on Oct. 7 before Minnesota came back for a 6-5 victory.

AP file

2013: Quinn Epperly sets NCAA record by opening with 29 straight completions

2013 — Quinn Epperly of Princeton sets an NCAA record by opening with 29 straight completions, and accounts for 401 total yards and six TDs in a 53-20 win over Cornell.

AP file

2014: Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger throws for six touchdowns for second consecutive week

2014 — Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger throws for six touchdowns for the second consecutive week, setting an NFL mark in a 43-23 win over Baltimore. Roethlisberger’s 12 touchdown passes over the last two games breaks the mark of 11 set by Tom Flores for Oakland in 1963 and matched by New England’s Tom Brady in 2007.

AP file

2016: Chicago Cubs win their first World Series championship since 1908

2016 — The Chicago Cubs win their first World Series championship since 1908 when Ben Zobrist hits a go-ahead double in the 10th inning, beating the Cleveland Indians 8-7 in a thrilling Game 7 delayed by rain early. Chicago is the first club to overcome a 3-1 Series deficit since the 1985 Kansas City Royals.

AP file

Brent Randol can be reached at brentrandol@comcast.net or (707) 481-3319.

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The land use permit process in California is notoriously complicated, lengthy and fraught with uncertainty. Less attention is paid to the process of obtaining building permits and subsequent approval. Generally, this process is simpler because local authority verification is limited to ensuring compliance with state and local building codes. Accordingly, the granting of building permits is usually a ministerial act, not subject to the discretion of city or county officials and not subject to appeal. However, in San Francisco, post-planning permits are barred from appeal to the Board of Appeal only if the project has received a conditional occupancy permit from the Planning Commission under Section 4.106(b) of the Charter. AB 1114, introduced by Rep. and former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney, would extend these protections to other housing projects that, for example, have only received a downtown project permit or a major project permit.

AB 1114 provides that building permits for projects that are “at least two-thirds residential” cannot be contested. It builds on previous legislation AB 2234, which sets strict timelines for local authorities to respond to and issue subsequent building permits for housing projects that meet existing application requirements. If passed, the bill would apply these deadlines to qualifying San Francisco housing projects and protect them from objections to building permits, regardless of the underlying eligibility.

In the Assembly Committee reports, Rep. Haney explained that the legislation was necessary because it could take almost two years to get back-to-back planning permission in San Francisco, due in part to the possibility of planning permission appeals, and that as a result, Die City “is struggling to build housing and is falling behind the rest of the state on its affordable housing goals.” The committee’s reports cite data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which shows that it’s an average of 450 days can take to get claims in San Francisco and an average of 524 days to get permits to start construction on a qualifying project — the longest time of any jurisdiction that allowed more than 10 projects.

The bill was recently passed by the Assembly and will now go to the Senate. We will continue to monitor progress and provide status updates.

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Tom Kean Jr., the son of a popular two-term New Jersey governor, beat six Republican opponents Tuesday to win the nomination to compete against Representative Tom Malinowski, an embattled Democrat accused of ethical lapses, in what is shaping up to be the state’s most competitive midterm contest.

Another son of a storied New Jersey political family, Robert Menendez Jr., easily won a Democratic House primary, making it likely that he and his father and namesake, the state’s senior senator, will serve together in the Capitol.

Mr. Malinowski, 56, in a swipe at Mr. Kean’s three unsuccessful campaigns for Congress, said: “I want to do this job. He just wants to have this job.”

Mr. Kean, 53, who narrowly lost to Mr. Malinowski in 2020, said his opponent had “squandered” the opportunity to serve New Jersey during two terms in Washington.

Mr. Kean’s primary opponents had challenged him from the right as they competed for the support of conservative Republican voters aligned with former President Donald J. Trump. Outside a school near Mr. Kean’s home in Westfield, NJ, where he voted on Tuesday with his wife and daughters, a sign parroting one of Mr. Trump’s favorite labels read, “Warning RINO alert.”

But just after midnight, he was more than 22 percentage points ahead of his closest opponent in a race that was seen at least in part as a measure of Mr. Trump’s grip on the Republican Party in a state better known for a moderate brand of Republican politics once epitomized by leaders like Mr. Kean’s father, Gov. Thomas H Kean.

The largely suburban Seventh Congressional District is filled with the type of affluent, well-educated voters who helped Democrats take control of the House in 2018.

During the last midterm cycle, Democrats in New Jersey flipped four seats—many of which, including Mr. Malinowski’s, are again seen as potential battlegrounds.

As he runs for re-election, Mr. Malinowski is facing allegations that he failed to report stock trades as required. He is also running in a district that gained more Republican-leaning towns when the borders were redrawn to reflect demographic changes in the 2020 census.

But late Tuesday, Mr. Malinowski’s campaign got a potential boost from an unlikely camp: Republicans hoping to make a home for centrist voters with the creation of a new party, the Moderate Party. The new party, which will almost certainly face legal challenges, has filed nominating petitions on behalf of Mr. Malinowski.

Mr. Menendez won in a largely urban district where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans five to one; winning the primary in the Eighth Congressional District, which includes parts of New Jersey’s two largest cities, is often tantamount to victory in the general election.

A lawyer making his first run for office, Mr. Menendez had an array of political and union support early on — as well as crucial backing from his father, also a Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Just after midnight, when The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Menendez, he was 70 percentage points ahead of his main challenger, David Ocampo Grajales.

If he wins in November, Mr. Menendez, 36, will occupy a seat held for a decade by Representative Albio Sires, a Democrat who announced in December he would not run for re-election.

Mr. Ocampo Grajales, the son of immigrants from Colombia, said last week that he had entered the race to give Democrats a viable alternative to a handpicked candidate.

“It’s not so much who Menendez is himself, but what he represents: more of the same,” said Mr. Ocampo Grajales, 25.

The New Jersey congressional candidate Tom Kean Jr., with his family, after voting at Wilson Elementary School in Westfield, NJ, on Tuesday.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

A Republican primary in a central New Jersey swing district represented by Andy Kim, a Democrat running for his third term in Congress, was the state’s most colorful contest.

Bob Healey Jr., a former singer in a punk band who helps run his family’s yacht-manufacturing company, beat two challengers, Nicholas J. Ferrera and Ian A. Smith, with the backing of the Republican Party.

In March, Mr. Smith, the former owner of a gym that repeatedly flouted Covid-19 lockdown rules, was charged with driving under the influence, reviving talk of his past conviction for vehicular homicide. He served time in prison for killing a teenager in 2007 while under the influence of alcohol, and pleaded not guilty to the new charges.

“I may have sung in my past about killing someone,” Mr. Healey said during a debate in May. “Ian actually did kill someone.”

By midnight, the winner of the Republican primary to face Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat competing for re-election to a fourth term, had not yet been called.

Frank Pallotta, a wealthy former investment banker who lost to Mr. Gottheimer two years ago, was 5 percentage points ahead of Nick De Gregorio, a Marine Corps veteran, with about 85 percent of the vote counted.

Mr. Pallotta won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump in 2020, but not this time. He also had raised significantly less money than Mr. De Gregorio, who had emphasized his service in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We did everything we possibly could, and we left no stones unturned,” Mr. De Gregorio said as he watched the returns come in from the Republican Party headquarters in Bergen County. “We went out there and we listened to what the voters had to say.”

Mr. Menendez will be a heavy favorite in November against Marcos Arroyo, a housing inspector from West New York, NJ, who was the lone Republican candidate to enter the race.

Mr. Menendez has said that, if elected, he would focus on expanding access to early childhood education and issues that affect the cost of living in New Jersey, where property owners pay some of the nation’s highest taxes.

“One of the things we’ve focused on — just because we don’t know the climate that we’re going to be walking into, should we win — is trying to think about what Democratic proposals haven’t been passed yet that we can have bipartisan support for,” Mr. Menendez said in an interview on Saturday.

Before being appointed to the Senate in 2006, Senator Menendez held the House seat that his son is now seeking. The borders of the district, formerly the 13th Congressional District, have since been redrawn slightly.

The state debuted a new electronic voting system in November, but this was the first time that New Jersey voters were offered a chance to cast ballots in person, on machines, during a primary election.

Still, with no statewide races on the ballot, turnout was low.

“We were told that we were the fourth and fifth people in our district to be voting today,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Tuesday morning, “and they’ve been open for a while.”

Shlomo Schorr contributed reporting.

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