The designation reads like permission. It is not.
There are 27 state marine protected areas mapped here across 3 regions, and 18 of them are no-take for a breath-hold diver. Several of those 18 are called conservation areas, which sounds like the permissive one. It is the distinction this whole site exists for.
A State Marine Conservation Area allows some take. Which take is written into its own paragraph of CCR Title 14 §632(b), and it differs area by area. At Lover’s Cove off Avalon the only legal take is hook-and-line from a single pier. Both conservation areas at La Jolla are hook-and-line only. For someone on a breath-hold with a speargun, all three mean the same thing as a reserve: nothing. Read the two-word designation as permission and it is the kind of mistake that ends in a citation.
Where every line comes from
Boundaries are CDFW’s own statewide MPA layer (ds582), not traced or approximated. Regulations are quoted verbatim from CDFW’s page for each area, carrying the section of §632(b), the area in square miles, a link to the source, and the date the page was read. Dive-site positions are USGS place names, good to about 100 m — a reference for the spot, not a drop point. Boundary corners come from the regulation itself and are published in degrees-decimal-minutes and as a GPX file, because that is what a chartplotter takes.
Nothing on the area pages is paraphrased. The summary at the top of each one is derived from the sentence underneath it, so the two cannot drift apart.
What is still missing
Southern California has 61 state marine protected areas. 27 of them are up. Orange County, the Malibu coast, Santa Barbara, San Clemente and the rest of San Diego are still to read. Areas that have not been read carry a marker that fails the build rather than rendering as open water, so this site should never tell you a place is unprotected because nobody got to it yet.
This is not legal advice
Rules change, and a page read in August is a page read in August. Every area here links to the CDFW page it was taken from. Check it before you take anything.