Puget Sound Fall Fishing 2012

The Puget Sound season ended last week. With that, we are done with another year of fishing! The fishing this fall in the Sound was great. In fact, it was the best local fall season we’ve had in probably the last decade. We delivered a number of fres shipments to the New Seasons Markets in Portland. After the first couple deliveries, we got several comments from the seafood managers that these were some of the finest Keta they had seen. We’d have to agree. Good meat color, firm texture and thick belly walls equals happy fishermen, buyers, and customers!

A fresh Puget Sound Keta salmon fillet seasoned with fennel fronds and bulb,olive oil, salt and pepper. Bake in the oven at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes…yum.

Our farmers market customers were just as happy.  We sell the small whole Keta salmon for $20 flat at the market, which is a great deal for a fresh, whole fish!  We also pick out a couple hundred pounds each weekend of large, bright salmon to fillet and bag for the farmers markets.  The Keta salmon has a 3-5 year life cycle, starting out as fry in freshwater, migrating to the ocean to grow and mature, and then running back to Puget Sound as adult salmon.  The 3-year-olds are usually the relatively smaller ones, whereas the 4 and 5-year-olds have a bit of extra time in the ocean to grow and come back larger.  Headed and gutted, a small Keta salmon is 4-5 pounds, whereas a large one is 9-12 pounds.  Keta is the 2nd largest species of Pacific salmon, behind King.

Jonah pitching out some nice fresh Puget Sound Keta salmon into totes, fall 2012.

Of the 5 species of Pacific salmon, the Pink and Keta are by far the most often misunderstood and stigmatized.  When we first started direct-marketing them at the farmers markets about thirteen years ago, most of our customers had never considered eating a salmon that is also known as “chum”.  Now we have a following of customers who realize what an amazing, natural resource this is, in addition to tasting delicious!  We do a couple things to maintain the integrity of the Pink and Keta we bring to market: we catch them in saltwater, bleed, clean and immerse them in  refrigerated seawater immediately after being caught, and rigorously grade the salmon during offload to ensure the right fish end up at the right place.  In the photo above, Jonah is sorting his fish out into 3 totes-#1 hi-grade’s, small #1’s, and smokers.  It was great to see such nice fish in the Sound this year!

Drew filleting fresh Puget Sound Keta in the Loki warehouse, fall 2012.

This fall was the first season since graduating college in 2007 that I didn’t fish with Pete on F/V Njord.  With the expansion of our inventory this summer, I thought it best if I focused on keeping the business operations humming.  Luckily, Drew found us online and worked out great.  He fished every opening with Pete, is working Sundays at the West Seattle Farmers Market, and is planning on deck handing with Pete in Alaska in the summer of 2013!
I’ll update again soon with what we’re up to this winter.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Catching Back Up

Monstrous Keta salmon from the 2012 summer season.

Things have been cooking over here at Loki Fish, so much so that I’ve been neglecting my poor blog pretty badly.  We’ve grown a bit as a company this summer in order to try to meet the needs of our growing customer base.  Last spring, we ended up having to dramatically slow down our wholesaling to grocery stores and restaurants, much to our chagrin and also our customers!  We squeaked by with enough product at the farmers markets, but it was a balancing act that was a little too close for comfort.  This past summer we worked closely with two of Pete’s formers deckhands – Mark Johansen (F/V Cora J) and Byron Spence (F/V Mount Royal) to help round out our inventory.  They have the same handling procedures as our two boats – namely, dressing the fish immediately on-board and immersing them in refrigerated seawater.  They also offload their fish on the dock in Alaska with us and send their fish down in our trucks.  We are keeping separate cold storage lots of their fish in order to assure our integrity at the farmers market is not compromised, where the business model is direct-marketing with no products allowed that are being re-sold.  We are hoping that this develops into a sustainable business model that will allow us to weather the natural ups and down of the fish business, while keeping our quality control and integrity at the forefront.

Delicious 6 oz. portions of pink salmon drizzled with yummy lemon sorrel sauce. Mmm.

This summers harvest was pretty strong, with a huge run of big, bright keta salmon to start it off.  They were followed by a strong run of medium-sized cohos, and the season ended with a very nice run of pink salmon.  It wasn’t our biggest year for sockeye, and was a fair amount less than the previous two or three years, but hopefully by working with Mark and Byron we will have sockeye available at least through the winter months.  We’ve got quite a bit of beautiful vacuum packed 6-7 ounce and 12-20 oz portions of pink, keta, coho and sockeye available on the online store.

A piece of red king from summer 2012. This one was cut from a 40 pound fish, and I do believe it was the nicest salmon I have ever seen.

This off-season we have a bit of marketing work to do, and we are also looking to continue to manufacture more of our own products in-house.  The year-round farmers markets continue to be the backbone of our operation, and our stores and restaurants should be kept happy by our expanded inventory.  Hopefully sometime in there we’ll take a little break also, but that might not be until the spring months.  Talk to you soon!

Danny samples some smoked coho at the University District Farmers Market, and he wears a mask while he does it. Good times had by all.

Happy Winter!

Winter had been extremely mild up until this week, when we saw some big snow in the Northwest and have been more or less closed for business the last couple of days.  We’re settling in nicely to the winter routine: weekend farmers markets, wholesale routes on Mondays and Fridays, and little projects/taking a breather in the middle of the week.

Speaking of little projects, we’ve been making some great batches of pickled salmon in the warehouse and selling it both at the farmers markets and to stores.

Amy and I made the trip down to Portland to do some demo’s at the New Seasons Markets the week after Christmas. We were sampling smoked keta, keta lox and pickled salmon. We spent 4 hours each day at their two newest stores: Fisher’s Landing and Progress Ridge. We really love the New Seasons Markets! Not only do they walk the talk in terms of working directly with small producers like ourselves, their stores are distinct in their extremely helpful brand of customer service. All in all, a great reason to get away to Portland for a couple days.

Our spring is projecting to be fairly quiet and mellow. In terms of our inventory, we are going to be running out of some products far before the boats leave for Alaska next June. We are going to do our best to keep the farmers markets stocked, while still keeping product on the shelves at our wholesale accounts for as long as we can. Every year is a little bit different, and it’s always a challenge trying to project our inventory over a number of months, since we put up almost all of our product for the year in a 10-12 week season. The longer we do it the less stressful it is though, generally speaking!