It's good to see the wind. The hell with feeling it. But to see it rake over the ocean and run along the new grass of a west-facing hill, there's a power and nostalgia and a certainty to it, even if any certainty of what it will bring for the fisherman was lost some years ago. Maybe an upwelling of the sea? Maybe the final days of the Humboldt squid in any water within 200 miles of here, which wouldn't break more than one heart, if any at all.

Maybe krill by the trillions, miles and miles of tiny bodies in rafted mass, so red it's almost frightening, like some glorious murder on the sea. And maybe then the salmon, living and eating and growing and, months from now, swimming the bays and rivers to forward the whole thing again.

There still are a few party boats and there are some private boats, too. There's that. There are boats at dry dock making repairs for fishing seasons that might or might not happen, which, in its own way, is a kind of hope. There's a skipper at the dock with four decades on the ocean, and he'll look right into you and say, "You don't know what'll happen. None of us do. But I know there are fish out there."

And you can drive home thinking about the ocean and the god in charge, while the northwest takes hold, while you watch for something, whispering, blow wind blow.

Brian Hoffman's weekly column, "The Fishing Report," appears in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursdays
(www.sfgate.com/columnists/hoffman). The California salmon fishery was closed again this year, as it was in 2008.