Not super impressed with the fisherman. Glad he got his best fish ever.
I should say that I am the poster boy for why the activity is called “fishing” and not “catching.” However, if someone more capable than me can get a fish within about five feet of the boat I can get it under control, dead, butchered, portioned and on plates and/or in the freezer.
Credit wear due, boating a fish that big by yourself in a small boat is a chore.
I’m not a net guy. I get a tail rope on and hang over the stern, bleed them there, do rough butchery there into a dish pan, and clean up in the galley. Keep blood and guts out of the boat and you don’t have to clean up AND you don’t have to worry about people slipping.
I’ve read a lot about fishing trying to get better. One of the keys seems to be structure. Inshore that means stuff on the bottom. Offshore it means things floating. There is a famous story of a sailboat fishing around a decaying elephant carcass several hundred miles West of Dakar. They spent half a day there until their freezer was full.
The most successful fishers I know offshore use handlines, some with outriggers. Amel sailboats have spinnaker poles that make GREAT outriggers. Most of these guys and gals will say they aren’t fishing, they’re shopping for meat.
This guy is well-spoken
Unspoken here is that he has an autopilot steering the boat. I use leather gardening gloves. I use a yo-yo. I also use really cheap booze (usually vodka) in the kills to stun the fish before I butcher. I like that better than a hammer or bat.
Lots of memories in the crawfish video. In 1985 (I think) I was in Pascagoula MS at Ingalls shipyard as a US Navy contractor serving as a design agent for LSD 44 (second flight of the LSD 41). One of the Ingalls VPs owned a share of a restaurant and we got a BOH tour before instruction on how to pick crawfish. It was kind of messy.
I found myself be scared for him, out there alone. Isn’t that kind of risky? When I was a kid a neighbor of mine in Quees, famous for his boat and fishing, went out alone one day, and if I recall correctly, boat came back without him.
There are only a handful of sea scallop farms in the United States, and most are in Maine, run by fishing families who, like the Brewers, are looking for ways to diversify beyond lobster while still keeping their boats in the water. But their number is growing.
Bivalve farming (along with kelp farming) is one of the most environmentally beneficial types of aquaculture, considered a zero-input food source because it doesn’t require any arable land, fresh water or fertilizers to grow protein. You don’t even need to feed bivalves; phytoplankton already present in the sea will sustain them.
… Uni, the delicate meat inside an urchin’s spiny shell, is a pricey delicacy. So it might seem that a surplus of urchins would be good business for commercial divers, but Mr. Trumper explained that the opposite is true. The purple urchins off the California coast are mostly inedible because they contain little to no uni. Having overgrazed the coastal kelp and devastated the red urchin population, the purple urchins are now starving. Worse still, they can exist in this state of starvation for decades, lying in wait to gobble up any kelp spores that appear, which prevents kelp forests from growing back.
Before the purple urchin population exploded, commercial divers fished primarily for red urchin like this one. The red urchin population has been decimated by the purple urchins.Credit…Dexter Hake for The New York Times
I would have agreed with you until I bought some canned salmon from Vital Choice. I thought it was delicious- nice and salmony instead of cat foody. They’re an online company, you may want to try it out. I’d be interested in your opinion of it.
