...I can;t see how poaching of any kind of edible wildlife will be reduced when prices rise.

There are rules even in harvesting wild plants, did you know?

Taking everything in sight causes plants to become extinct...no matter how hungry your family is. People will be hungrier, over time.

Fledgling, I didn't know you were a fellow Canadian!
Very disturbing, the whole business I've been haring lately about the GM'd "Atlantic Salmon". I did not realize the name is just a name, means nothing in terms of location--and that it's almost impossible to tell wild from farmed anymore, given the "escapee" effect....among other sorrows and horrors.


Hope all goes well with you, and you are recovering nicely.

best, C

I was given an Atlantic 'trout' that melted in my mouth.

:D

I think it was a variety of salmon. And, talk about rich!

It wasn't big, but sweet, pink, and delicate.

I would imagine that there aren't enough of them to make a whole fishery of the species.

It was cleaned so I baked it, then took off the skin and went after the bones.

Of course, I had to tidy up the bits that came off in this process, and any thin bits that wouldn't travel well...so the meat shrunk accordingly. Then, of course, I just stood there and gobbled.

Nobody else at our house cared. Dh catches salmon to eradicate the species.

That's why he told me, in the first 1/2 hour we met, that he was going to take me fishing.


I fooled him, however...I became a bottom fisher, red snapper was my game.

When he bought me a Peetz (sp.) rod and reel and a metal bait 'fish', and took me to the cliff face at Mittlenatch (sp.) Island, a bird sanctuary near the island where my mother was raised, I dropped the 1 pound lure 235 feet and began to try to slowly bounce it off the bottom rocks.

I couldn't.

It was caught, I thought between rocks.

So I gave the rod to dh and he gave it a mighty tug...then handed it back.

I began to reel that suc*** in, because there was a fish on it.

Then the line began to move in a zig-zag pattern, back and forth. This was no snapper.

It was a 20-pound pink salmon, and it was a head-fish.

A head-fish has a fisheries implant which tells them when and where it was released.

When you clean a head-fish you weigh it, cut off the head, tag that, and put it in a bucket near the cleaning table up from your marina.

The fisheries department collects the buckets daily, processes the information, and mails you a little plastic pin with a nice letter of thanks for participating in their salmonid program.

(We can recognize a head-fish because they clip off a tiny fin the salmon doesn't use. The bald eagles wait over by the creek/river mouth for the proceeds of the cleaning tables.)


Red snappers don't zig-zag...they come up with their mouths wide open, like a bucket of water. Now that's work!

A big, knuckle-buster wooden reel is needed because the lighter reels would just pull all out of shape.


So that's the story of my first 'snapper', a big salmon who was sitting on the bottom on a hot day, waiting for me.

All the snapper we did catch changed dh's fishing experience entirely...drift fishing is entirely different from trolling. I even caught a clam who opened his mouth when my hook was drifting by.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about sweet fishing memories. That's how I was courted.

A woman who can handle fish, and what I call 'square water', and enjoy herself, is a treasure to some men.

F.