Leland E. Hale: Moose Meat & Bycatch

The fish we were going for were pink salmon, the mainstay of the canned salmon industry. We caught ‘em by the gross. When we pulled up a chinook as part of our bycatch (1), we set it aside in a brine-filled bucket outside the wheelhouse. One day soon, we would have a bycatch dinner.

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Pink Salmon (ocean phase; credit: Wikipedia)

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Chinook Salmon (ocean phase; credit: Wikipedia)

In the meantime, it was moose, followed by moose, supplemented with moose and augmented by more moose. Part of the reason for that seemingly monotonous menu was the fact that we lacked a refrigerator onboard the Three Sisters. Instead we had a larder that acted as a chiller. The moose meat arrived frozen and my goal was to systematically cook it as it thawed. Waste nothing was our watchword. There’s no garbage pickup at sea and the nearest grocery is still out of reach.

My lunch tacos were an accidental success. I say accidental because, after giving up on the burners, I turned to the oven as backup. I resorted to turning it on high, then placing the fry pan inside, where the heat held even after the fire went out. It’s a restaurant trick, but I discovered it out of necessity. It helped me keep my fish juggler rhythm too: somehow, I even managed to cook dinner in between sets.

Dinner was a shared meal, served after the last set of the day. Everyone was there, including the skiffman. That first night out, we had moose enchiladas, my “specialty.” That damned oven was my savior. The enchiladas were perfect and talk soon turned to the day’s catch. We’d done all right for a bunch of greenhorns.

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There was no time to celebrate. We turned in soon thereafter, another early start ahead of us.

I angled myself into the narrow confines of the fo’c’sle, my sleeping station in the depths of the bow. The sauntering seas of Southeast Alaska rocked me to sleep. I dreamed of our bycatch chinook, fat and succulent. I awoke at 0-dark-thirty and started a moose omelette, fried potatoes and coffee. I noticed a persistent ache in my shoulders. Stacking net, I thought. Gotta get better at stacking the net.


(1) The “bycatch” is any sea creature that’s not part of the target catch. It’s a serious problem, because the bycatch is too often wasted — and sometimes there’s more bycatch than target catch. During my short, two-week stint on the Three Sisters, we only brought in one chinook salmon — and we did not waste it.

Copyright Leland E. Hale (2018). All rights reserved.


Craig

Order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE, true crime from Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.

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