Posts Tagged ‘fish’

Today I am proud to present the greatest photo I never took.

Bald Eagle Fishing, Craig, AK

Whilst in Alaska last year, I stayed for a week in Craig where my cousin’s husband was working. It’s a 2 hour ferry and hour’s drive from Ketchikan (itself only accessible by ferry or plane) so it’s kind of remote. To make the most of the beautiful, still weather they were enjoying (made more eerie by the haze from huge forest fires across the border in British Columbia), after work, Michael took us all out in a skiff for a spot of fishing.

The water was glassy, with not a breath of wind and we shot out into the bay for about 30 minutes heading for an area where the seabed rose up to within 15 feet of the surface, a good fishing spot I was reliably informed. And, it proved to be, Michael reeling in a tasty dinner every 5 minutes or so. Even I managed to snag a couple of rockfish, which I was all excited about, but one disdainful look from Valerie told me all I needed to know, and we threw it back.

It floated slowly away from the boat, and we got on with catching some more serious fish. At this point we were around half a mile away from the shore, with nothing else around and surrounded by total silence (the occasional noise of a whale exhaling could be heard).

A couple of minutes after the fish had gone back in the water, Valerie spotted a black shape in the distance flying towards us. “An eagle” she said, “It’s seen the rockfish.” And sure enough, having seen the fish in the water from half a mile away, a bald eagle was flying towards us, looking for dinner. It flew past us once to check out what was floating in the water, looped round and in one fluid movement, scooped my luckless fishy friend from the water, 15 feet away from the boat.

I had brought my camera along, and Valerie was holding it when the eagle swooped, and she managed to get a shot of it’s tailfeathers as it flew off. Her son Simon however, managed to get the perfect shot, so I will always have a reminder of what has to be the most incredible thing I have ever been lucky enough to have witnessed.

The Daily Catch

If you want to be shot in Alaska, other than doing it yourself (which, given the low levels of sunlight in winter it seems a lot of people do. The state has the highest per capita suicide rate in the US), there are 2 ways. Say the wrong thing about Sarah Palin to the wrong person or announce loudly and proudly that you eat farmed fish. Man, they hate that. On the surface (or under it at least, ha ha!) farming seems a sensible solution. In areas where the salmon population has been overfished, give the wild ones a chance to recover by placing huge net cages near the shore and grow the little blighters like chickens. That way, the supermarkets remain stocked with nutritious tasty fishies, jobs are provided for areas hit by a collapsed fishing industry (by necessity, fish farms are set up in areas where the salmon occur naturally, often at the mouth of a spawning stream) and nature is untouched to carry on doing what it does. Right?

Well, no as it happens. The fish farms are messing up the environment just as much, if not more as fishing. Fish, like chickens, are not designed to confined to a cage in huge numbers. When one fish gets an infection, a lot of the other salmon, being in close proximity, also become infected. The infection affects the skin and the fish shed flakes of infected scales. As they are in a net, these flakes float out into the sea, where the wild salmon either leaving or returning to their natal stream swim through a huge cloud of horribleness. Wild fish in turn become infected, making it very hard for the natural population to recover and/or stay healthy.

Strike one for the fish farms. Strike two is the fact that in order to combat the infections, fish farms pump a lot of antibiotics into the water, which not only cause mutations in the farmed salmon (which we then eat, even the mututated ones), also of course cause untold damage to the wild population beyond the nets. And thirdly, farmed fish tastes awful, really fucking bad. As I said earlier, I used to think I didn’t like fish, I know realise I love fish, just none of the fish I’ve eaten before. I’ve been lucky enough to eat a lot of fresh seafood in the last 3 weeks. Halibut, rockfish, lingcod, shrimps, crab and, of course, salmon. It truly and honestly tastes fantastic – fresh, delicate and healthy. I’ve eaten it every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ve not eaten meat for 3 weeks (aside from a hot dog, gimme a break, I was drunk) and have felt no desire to. From a raw chunk sliced from a beautiful, whole, deep red coho (sockeye), rockfish tacos, home-smoked king salmon to crab cakes, I’ve stuffed my face.

I’ve eaten corn-fed beef from happy cows and it does taste “nicer” than feedlot cattle, but the difference between farmed salmon and wild salmon is staggering. It’s a million miles from what we in Europe (or me at least) know as fish. I loved it. Obviously, I was lucky enough to be in a place where some of the world’s finest is plucked directly from the ocean, if you catch it yourself, sea to plate in 3 hours. Very few of the 175 million make their way to Europe and when they do the price is often prohibitive for mere mortals, but if you ever get the chance to try it, leap (see what I did there?) at it. And do us all a favour, when you eat fish, eat sustainably caught fish and secondly, you’d always buy free-range chickens so please don’t eat farmed fish, it’s really not worth it.

Let’s play a game. How about Word Association? I’ll say a word and you come up with a word or phrase it makes you think of. First thing that pops into your head. OK? Ready? Here goes…

…Salmon.

You probably (bear with me here) came up with “fish” or maybe “leap” or more likely “flaccid piece of pale pink something in a polysterene tray from Tesco, but it’s full of omega 3 therefore healthy and I feel virtuous”. Amirite?

Of course I am, that’s what salmon means in the UK. Well, not in Alaska it doesn’t, and particularly not in Ketchikan, the Salmon Capital of the World. Salmon in Alaska is a way of life. Getting the ferry up, in the middle of day 2 I started seeing ripples in the water and got all excited (it was 38 hours on a boat, didn’t take much), wondering what mighty sea creature could be causing this. Before I long I caught sight of the culprit, none other than a large salmon leaping a good two feet out of the water, a quick shimmy and splashing back in to the water. I watched for a while and time and again I saw fish doing this. Sometimes just the once, other times clearly the same fish jumping out of the water 3 or 4 times in quick succession. I thought it was fantastic and very novel.

I’ve since realised that salmon do this all the time, particularly in the summer just prior to their spawning run, and I’ve grown very blasé about it. Whenever there is a bit of sea here, salmon are jumping out of it. It’s very cool. I’ve heard three theories as to why they do it, first they’re catching insects. Second it’s in their blood, it’s how they get upstream and they’re just practicing. Thirdly, it’s only females and they do it to force their eggs nearer to the business end so it’s easier for laying. One & three came from non-Alaskans I met on the ferry and the second one was my cousin, so I’m going with the local knowledge.

I don’t eat a lot of fish, I know I should eat more, but the fact is I don’t really like it that much. Plus I remember reading an article once where it pointed out that some vegetarians like to take the moral ground about not eating meat, saying it is immoral, all the while eating fish, which is taken from the wild rather than farmed. The author made the point that if all the cows in the world disappeared, no natural ecosystem would suffer, finish off one species of fish and it’s a different matter entirely. Countless other species would suffer.

If salmon were the species wiped out, then not only would a few summer barbeques suffer. Salmon not only feed us, but at the various stages of their life they also feed bears, eagles, otters and many larger fish to name but a few. They are born and grow in a stream, spend 1-5 years in the ocean and then return to the same stream (nobody knows how they find it) to spawn and die. Once spawned, their decaying bodies in the thousands of streams and lakes provide nutrients to the soil which improves the berries growing nearby, which feed birds, deer and bears (again). It’s an amazing, finely balanced, well established cycle of life and death.

Until the human race comes along of course. Alaska prides itself on having a sustainable salmon population. Fishing and bycatch is well-monitored and blackouts can be (and are) declared if returning salmon numbers are low. The state runs hatcheries to increase the numbers of young salmon entering the streams, fish ladders are installed to allow returning fish to bypass hydroelectric installations. Which is just as well, seeing as even given all that Alaska takes 175,000,000 salmon out of the sea each year. That’s 175 million legal fish, not counting the untold numbers caught by illegal Chinese, Russian and Japanese boats. Overall is does seem to be a healthy system and the the Alaskans seem to have understood that we can’t just take as many fish out of the sea as want, without disaster, not least the collapse of the fishing industry.