Jones Family Farms Lopez Island, Washington

Fish-O-Gram! Fresh Corvina! Halibut 10 Day Countdown! Divers Got Talent, Illustrated!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 17:39:00 +0000

Dear March 14th Customers,

This is a week of reflection and anticipation as we prepare ourselves for the oncoming flurry and excitement of halibut season. Eastern Fishes have been granted a fishing-free reprieve as the Eastern seaboard is slammed by storm after storm. Local fishes are drying up a bit as everyone pulls back to prepare for halibut. A bright spot is beautiful Corvina, available whole or filleted. We do have some lovely whole Petrale from Oregon, as well as Rock, Truecod and Dover. Also, new this week is Poke grade tuna, suitable for, Poke, we guess. Pink Scallops roll onward, with excellent abundance and quality. Hold On! Halibut Is Almost Here.

Just 10 short days.....

In honor of the Anticipation we have Hold On, by Sam and Dave for the JFF Song of the Week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Fowldx4hRtI

Milestones.

Our $5 bill is now Stapled to the Bathroom Ceiling.

Fish-O-Gram Hits Seattle.

Yesterday, your Fish-O-Gram correspondent and Mikuni's Kevin Mock were lucky enough to be the first paying customer at the new, super-sized Babirusa yesterday in the formerly Ghetto-Fabulous Kushibar Space (now all cleaned up). We had drinks and spuds before heading off to an oyster tasting at the White Swan. Congratulations Charles and Rene, what an achievement! we couldn't be more pleased for you and your crew. Incidentally, the consensus favorite oyster of last night's White Swan oyster tasting was the Church Pt. from Rivera Shellfish. The Church Points were full without being overwhelming, with a wonderful finished, polished, texture, a slightly astringent foretaste with a little bit of underripe persimmon. But the real thing was the finish. A long, lingering, complex but elusive lineup of flavors. The best comment was that the Church Pts taste like Nostalgia.....

Congratulations Noay and crew!

JFF Product Highlights, 3.14.18.

Corvina, Mexico

Refresh Troll White King, AK

Fresh Whole Petrale, OR

Giant Pacific Octopus, AK

Pink Scallops, Salish Sea

Pacific Oysters, All Shapes and Sizes, Salish Sea.

Fresh Albacore, Fiji

Time Strapped Chefs Turn Back!!! Onward to Regular-Form Fish-O-Gram!!!

Like it is Like It Was.

Halibut Dreaming.

Springtime is in the air...A chef's thoughts turn to a magical flatfish. These past weeks we have seen increasing availability of Black Cod, true cod and other western delights. But these are just crumbs, and from a piscine/sales vantage point we are still chugging through deep-winter. All this changes in 10 short days. March 24 marks the first day of halibut season coast-wide. The center of gravity of the halibut fishery, of course is Alaska, with over 17 million pounds of halibut landed. Canada too is a mighty player in the halibut game, with a 2018 quota of better than 6 million pounds.

Our Home Seas Grow Mighty Flatfish

Last in line is a tiny Oregon/Washington fishery, with a quota of barely more than a million pounds. A subset within that subset are the hundred or so thousand pounds of that million caught in the island studded waters of the Salish Sea. These fish are our March Madness. our glory, and it is our privilege to be the vehicle by which this extraordinary sub-population of fish are transported to a lucky sub-population of chefs.

Home is Where the Water Flows.

It's the Water...

Salish Sea waters are some of the best flushed, most lively marine waters in the world. However, the basin also boasts a myriad of small sweet bays where the swirling Pacific currents slow down, warm up, and yield an explosion of marine life, from phytoplankton all the way up. This unique state of affairs means that everything from the Salish Sea just tastes a little better. As for the Salish Sea Halibut, they have a sweetness, density and depth of flavor unmatched by any other halibut. Cut-Out yields on the Salish fish are substantially higher than from Alaska or Washington Coast fishes, shelf-life is superior and the eating experience is unparalleled. Also, the inside fish enjoy a much higher percentage of the larger 20/40 and 40/60 fish sizes than these other areas.
A few years back we did a systematic investigation of the stomach contents of these halibut. We found them stuffed with Spot Prawns and soft Dungeness Crab, explaining definitively why these fish taste so good.

A Flatfish Like No Other.

It's the love...

Commercial harvest from Inside Waters is limited to specific Treaty tribes, namely the three S'Klallam tribes plus the Suquamish, Tulalip, Swinomish, Nooksack and Lummi tribes. For a handful of soul-stirring days each spring the mosquito fleets of the tribal fishery convert crab boats to longliners to chase halibut. Most of these folk are year-round fishers and for many of them Halibut is the annual highpoint. Every fish is individually handled, gutted and iced on board, landed on shore and brought to you as a gift and a blessing.

One of our favorite Crews.

Seeking Good Homes for Extraordinary Fish.

Over the years the vast bulk of these fish have gone into commodities fish outlets--in many cases pawned off as Alaskan fish to a misinformed public. Starting a few years back, we, and a handful of other small-time fish brokers have steered more and of these fish to appropriate and appreciative markets. This new order has led to some interesting rumbles on and off the water, but the general trend toward more specific marketing of this fish is very positive. This year JFF, Lummi Island Wild and Mikuni Wild Harvest have ceased competing, declared a Millennium, and have joined forces to purchase, represent and showcase these peerless fish.

All Together Now.

Salish Sea Halibut and You.

Subject to the ever-surprising variables of weather, tribal politics and, of course, the uncertainties of any wild fishery, we expect the first fish in Seattle Sunday Morning the 25th. Depending on subsequent openings, we are expecting to be flush with local halibut from March 25th through early May. Reserve yours today! Accept No Substitutes!

We are Counting on You.

Weekly Pink Scallop Feature. Lovely, Fluted and Seasonally Appropriate.

Courtesy of Mona Johnson.

Craft Corner.
Past Fish-O-Grams have generally painted commercial harvest divers, on whom we rely, as a shiftless, substance-loving and heavy users of the criminal justice system. This is unfair. Part of this reflected reputation is a relic of the old days in the industry, part of it is intended to be good-humored banter and part of it is, well, true, depending on the makeup of individual divers. Like every corner of the seafood business, diving does have it's share of desperate characters of varying stripes. Plus, for those born with dubious impulse control, long-term exposure to compressed air does no good at all.

Outlaws No More.
Mostly, however, commercial harvest divers are dedicated professionals engaged in an extraordinarily taxing profession. Our scallops divers are wonderful folk, and we salute them. Joe Littlefield, our top-producing diver, is not just a Dedicated Father, Mighty Hustler and Superman of the Undersea, he has a whole secret life off the water.

Tools of the Trade.

Armed with a glue gun, soldering iron, and strips of paper mache, Joe spends his sleepless nights crafting amazing functional artworks. With his permission, we are delighted to share them with you.

Until Next Time, We Are Your Corvina Selling, Poke Chopping, Restaurant Opening, Oyster Shucking, Sam and Dave Jamming, Halibut Holding-On, Mikuni/Lummi Wild Partnering, Scallop Extolling, Art Appreciating, JFF Crew.

Call or Write, We Promise to Write Back!

N&S

Fish-O-Gram #32! Nor'Easter Hits! Urchin YES! Winter Surprise! Black Cod Resurfaces! Oysters Approach Annual Prime! F.O.G. Government Affairs Desk--Lobsters Rejoice--Switzerland Outlaws Live Boils! Mandates Hamster Socialization!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 02:39:00 +0000

Dear Storm-Lashed Customers

Sunday Evening at Jones (Shellfish) Ranch.

Wizard Of Oz Time.

These latter days at Jones Ranch have been frosty and wind-swept. We thought we were in line for an early spring but we were wrong. Sunday's blow knocked oyster tanks off of cribbing, scattered trays and plumbing supplies, smashed up our small boat fleet and launched a 20' long drying rack a couple of hundred feet in the air. Nor'Easters are a legendary and feared force in the San Juan Islands. Cold air comes roaring down the Fraser River Valley and blasts the islands--really bad Nor'Easters are rare, but when they come the results can be apocalyptic. In deep winter the ground is generally saturated with water. A hard freeze limits the elasticity of tree roots and heaves the water-saturated ground. In the right conditions trees can come down like Pixie-Stix. One story from way back concerns a Lopez Island pioneer Bat Clancy. Bat owned a forty acre tract of old-growth timber across from his house. He steadfastly refused to log his forest, long after old growth had been scalped from the rest of the island. Melvin Graham, neighbor and County Commissioner at the time approached Bat one more time to ask about logging the parcel--Bat's trees were shading one of Melvin's fields and making it impossible to cure hay on a wide swath of the field. Bat Again refused. That next winter a Nor'Easter came up and laid down every stick on that forty acres. So Melvin got his sunshine, Bat got a lifetime supply of firewood and planted a small orchard in the middle of his formerly-treed 40. Decades later we leased Melvin's field from his daughter and the resurgent forest on what had been Bat's 40 shaded the southern portion of field to the point that curing hay was next to impossible. Plus ca change....

A Platter Named Desire....Pink Scallop Photo of the week. Note the Olys snuggled in the ice....

Courtesy of Louis Morales, Pioneer Square Taylor Shellfish Bar

Winter Surprise at Jones Ranch!

Early Springers.

Precocious Goats

Some weeks ago, while feeding the goats on a normal January day we came upon a freshly born goat kid. In the days following we welcomed another 50 more. This was a surprise of several fronts, normally we schedule goat breeding in order to produce goat kids in late March or early April-once spring grasses are fully on and available. This past year we put the buck in, as usual, November 1. Given a five month gestation, this should have yielded goat kids on April 1. Unbeknown to us, a young goat buck escaped castration last spring, and goats being the precocious animals they are, successfully bred the entire herd. On the whole is has been an extremely successful kidding--we only lost one mama and a few babies. As of now we have two vigorous kids, Banjo and Lucky, living in the house with us, while the rest of the herds prances around the rocks behind our house and consumes incredible amounts of hay. In a week or two we are going to move them down the road, but for the moment we are entertaining a steady stream of goat-phillic visitors. Come one come all!
See Videos attached below, check out our goat video-centric Instagram Page!.

Fish-O-Gram Government Affairs Desk--Switzerland Outlaws Live Lobster Boils!

Just Get Me to Switzerland.

Too Much Time on Their Hands

While American Government degenerates into a reality tv horror show, our friends across the pond are getting down to business. As of March 1, lobsters will enjoy special protections in the landlocked nation of Switzerland. Live boiling of lobsters will be illegal, with penalties of up to three years in prison for boiling a lobster without first stunning or killing it. Furthermore, lobster may only be brought across the border in conditions approximating their natural environment, namely in large volumes of seawater. Further investigation reveals that Switzerland already imposes criminal penalties on pet owners who keep only one hampster, or do not allow domestic cats daily interaction with their own kind. Left unsaid are the rights and privileges of Langustines, Crayfish and Crab, but that can only be next.

Tell it like it is.

Switzerland going all-in for the lobsters reminds us of a Seattle PI report, years back, on a PETA confrontation therapy campaign dubbed "Fish are People Too", an effort to get sports and commercial fishers to contemplate the error of their ways. PI reporters tracked Seattle Salmon Purse Seine skipper Paul Matson for commentary, "I stalk them, surround them, kill them and sell the flesh,' he said while sitting on a bar stool at The Highliner, the bar at Fishermen's Terminal. 'And I couldn't care one little bit what the rest of the world thinks about the hierarchy of sentient beings.'" https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/PETA-Fish-feel-so-don-t-eat-them-1159722.php

Switzerland, Imelda Marcos and Moral Hypocrisy

We here at Jones Ranch try to take a more politic tone when dealing with misguided activism--for years we sold meats and seafoods at the Orcas Farmers Market and could generally count on at least one weekly confrontation with a militant vegan and so developed a full roster of firm-but-gentle rejoinders. Beyond the comedy of granting rights to crustaceans--after all, think of what they would do to us if the tables were turned?--lie deeper issues and trends--for one thing, this is a fine case study in the absurdities of claimed moral high ground from a nation that owes it's prosperity to helping kleptocratic billionaires hide their money from justice, or the spectacle of lobsters making asylum claims, or legislators and police wasting their time on the finer points of Hamster-to-Hampster interactions. But none of this matters to the high-minded, tempeh-scarfing set.

Imelda Sez, "Thank God for the Swiss"

Today Cuttlefish and Lobsters, Where will This End?

Some weeks back we reported on European Union legislation granting rights to Octopuses, Squid and Cuttlefish. Taken together, we see this as indicative of a disturbing trend of applying abstract human values to the natural world, stemming, we think, from the ever greater remove of humans from the land, sea and the glories of food production and nutrient cycles. With yeast-based, tank-raised faux burger now hitting the market and en ever-larger segment of the population adopting unwholesome vegan and vegetarian lifestyles, we are probably in sight of a day when foodie diehards are forced to smuggle live crab in trenchcoats and real meat is outlawed. We promise to kick, scream and fuss, but this sort of societal meta-trend is probably unstoppable. (See Matt Ridley blog on meat eating http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/meat-eating/.) When that day comes you, our customers, have our solemn pledge to go underground and carry on. Husbandry, stewardship, and real foods are the rock on which we Jones Ranchers stand. If that makes us outlaws in the eyes of the Swiss, the Vegans and Jerry Brown, so be it.

We Embrace the Outlaw Lifestyle.

Until next time we are your Storm Surviving, Product Listing, Urchin-Season Extending, Black Cod Selling, Spring Oyster Extolling, Lobster Boiling, Food Freedom Loving, Swiss-Horrifying, Hamster-Handling JFF Crew.

Call or write....We promise to write back!

N&S

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 03:51:00 +0000

Dear Un-Prohibited Customers,

Silly Laws Create Creative Outcomes.

Ninety-eight years ago Nebraska today ratified the 18th amendment to the Constitution, pushing it over the top and outlawing the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol. Washington State had already banned alcohol, both through "local option" laws and a 1918 "Bone Dry" statewide measure. San Juan County had gone dry some years prior, following a visit from famed evangelist Billy Sunday. In San Juan County, alcohol was illegal between 1911 and 1933. Banning hootch was a dreadfully earnest endeavor, the notion being that boozy fathers would buck up and spend their times and money on family rather than swilling rotgut and pinching barmaids. The reality of course was nowhere near the ideal. Folks drank just the same but the liquor trade went underground.
San Juan County, being a boundary county between puritanical, dry American soil and a decadent and licentious Canada, became a hub for bootlegging and rum running in these years. Islanders of that era were a web-footed bunch, many of them growing up on and around the water, and those who took to to smuggling did so as ducks take to water. Early smugglers started with row and sailboats, and quickly moved onto more and more powerful motorboats.

Let the Games begin.

Billy Wilson and the Black Pup.

Coast Guard and other law-enforcement agencies did their best, but local knowledge of these twisting waterways and the profit motive generally won out over under-powered Federales. For many years the primary enforcement boat in the Islands was the steam powered Scout, nicknamed the "Black Pup", with a top speed of 6 knots--about the speed of a well designed rowboat. Billy Wilson, a farmer, blacksmith, bootlegger, smuggler and former owner of Jones Ranch, did some hard time in the McNeil Island Penitentiary for smuggling during those years. He and his crew got caught hauling whiskey from Vancouver Island to Lopez and stashing the goods in various barns on the extreme South End of the island.

Stately but slow.

Lessons Learned.

As students of history and avid drinkers ourselves, we view Prohibition through the lens of the ongoing American push-pull between High-Minded Totalitarianism and Reality, with the entrepreneurial and unscrupulous ever-willing to rush into the breach. Perhaps the greatest lesson of prohibition is that a state that chooses to criminalize normal behavior effectively normalizes criminal behavior, with all sorts of nasty long-term consequences. Above all, despite any madness any government can throw at us, prohibition is an object lesson in how the human spirit, and the desire for alcohol, always triumphs. This tension plays out to this day. In local terms, prohibition was a glorious canvas on which people played out games of intrigue, gain and risk. Prohibition also marked a high point in Island prosperity. For Billy Wilson and the boys, the good times came to a crashing halt on December 5, 1933 with passage of the 21st amendment, repealing the 19th amendment. After his release his former associates gave him 40 acres on Iceberg Point--one of the most beautiful places on earth- in gratitude for not squealing. Billy Wilson spent his latter days brewing and drinking his own, working the dying trade of blacksmithing and raising sheep, including a purebred flock on his Iceberg Place. We treasure the last few buildings standing from his era, and maintain a large and growing collection of Billy Wilson artifacts, including agate marbles, various hand-forged tools, and a full selection of horseshoes. We do our best to carry on in his place and in his name.

Billy Wilson, JFF Salutes You! Never let local, state or federal governments get between you and your tipple of choice!

Wedding day at Jones Ranch, 1915.

Crab Troubles.

The long-awaited West-Coast Dungeness opener has opened with a whisper, and not a bang. The headline Washington Coast, Oregon and Central/Northern California Crab seasons all finally opened on Monday, following a prolonged wait for the meat percentage to reach acceptable levels. Typically these fisheries open in early-mid December, in time to maximize holiday sales. Southern California has been turning out a few crab, as has the ongoing Puget Sound fishery, but catches have been slow and pricing high.Crabbers are afraid that dropping millions of pounds of product on a soft market will crash pricing. The big boy processors have been firing up their freezers to take the expected onslaught of product, but given the timing of this all, the offer prices are low compared to the past few years. Southern California has been turning out a few crab, as has the ongoing Puget Sound fishery, but catches have been slow and pricing high. Now the marquee fisheries are open, but the weather has kicked up and the crabbers are semi-striking. So pricing is still awfully high, though extremely volatile, and crab brokers are running the thinnest of inventories in order not to get hurt when the volume finally hits and the price does tumble. Troubled times in crab world..... order and we'll do our level best. Stay tuned for updates!!

Scallops.

Eating Pink Scallops is one of the best things about being human. Our ancestors ate grubs and bashed each other with sticks so that a blessed few of their descendants could prance around on the seafloor scooping up scallops and the rest of us could enjoy Deep-water treats for the first time in human history. If you are not currently serving them, why not?

Courtesy of Erik Johnson Photography.

Urchin Bonus Round.

The state quota has been definitively thumped, but our Swinomish and Lummi friends are now hacking away at the tribal quota on urchin. Between storms and other fisheries, urchin supply is fitful, but any urchin after the first of the year is a gift. The urchins are getting closer to spawning--watch for white extrusions from the uni. JFF is firmly convinced that Uni is on a one-way track to culinary glory, that urchins are the Puget Sound version of Truffles, caviar, or, well, Puget Sound Salmon, Pink Scallops and more, but in a punchier formulation. We eat uni at every chance. You should too.

It's 2018 and still swingin'.

White King and Farewell to A King of Our Hearts and Plates.

Some months back Jon Rowley, a man we are proud to claim as a mentor, cheerleader, and friend succumbed to kidney disease. Jon defines an era of Northwest seafood and the development of a Seattle-Specific culinary sensibility like no-one else. He drove and embodied the change from a volume, commodities-driven fishery to the joyful, quality focused and and sustainable fishery we enjoy and celebrate today. All of us today in the business who aspire to do anything worthwhile are Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, namely Jon. Those interested in Jon may find more information in a handful of excellent articles profiling Jon, includinghttps://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/jon-rowley-promotes-the-tastes-we-come-to-crave/.

Sunday, greater Seattle gathered to mourn his passing. Yesterday a smaller group gathered to enjoy a meal in his spirit. We were lucky enough to furnish the salmon for this meal-- spectacular FAS Queen Charlotte Islands Ivory King Salmon. Last night we enjoyed Kevin Davis' version of this fish, prepared for Jon Rowley's memorial dinner. The fish is everything we could have hoped for, and a fully fitting for Jon's farewell meal. The most special of fish for the special-est of people. We have a limited volume of this fish available as frozen or refresh, H&G or fillet. Don't let these fish slip away without offering them on your plate!

The best of the best.

Diatoms to the Rescue.

While the rest of the nation labors under snow and storm, we West Coasters have been enjoying an uncommonly sunny winter, reminiscent of dimly remembered Washington winters of the early 1980s. At Jones Ranch this means the winter grain is shooting up and the elderberries are leafing out. At the shellfish farm we have seen the first algae of the season, the slimy, ground-swelling chain diatoms. This is about three weeks earlier than usual. What this means is that algae eaters, including oysters, are getting an unexpected gift of food and flavor-boost. To you, this means that all Washington oysters are developing the high, glory flavors of early spring early this year. We can already discern the high, lingering flavors of spring in the animals. It has been a long, long time since we have seen an early spring here. Every winter puts northern folk to the test and every spring is a gift and a joy, whether it comes in January or in April. Here's to the oysters, here's to the weather, here's to the single celled photosynthesizing critters who make it all happen.

Algae Eaters, and Eaters of Algae Eaters, give thanks.

JFF list Highlights 1.16.18.

Pink Scallops, FAS Ivory King, Nisqually Oysters, Monkfish, John Dory, Giant Pacifc Octo, Lopez Island Smelt, Quinault Steelhead, AK Spot Prawns, OR, Brine Packed.

Until Next Time, we are your Bone-Dry-Voting, Proudly-Tippling, Black Pup-Dodging, Crab-Troubling, Scallop-Extolling, Uchin-Encore-ing, Rowley-Waking, Oyster-Loving, Plankton-Identifying, JFF Crew.

N&S

Call or write! We promise to write back, especially if you place an order!

FISH-O-GRAM #29. Fish-O-Gram!! PINKS TO THE PEOPLE!!! SCALLOPS STORM BACK TO THE PLATE!!! JFF Goes Low on Albacore Loin! Christmas Coho! More Sturgeon! Oyster Of the Month! Razor Clams 2-U. Urchins--Get Them Now! Science Corner--the Echinoidea Edition!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 14:33:00 +0000

All Pinked Up in Bellevue!!! Bake's Place Posts First Scallop Photos of the Season!!

Pink Scallops Hit Bake's Place in Bellevue! Thank you Nicholas!

Dear Fish-Hounding Customers,

It just doesn't have to be this way....

Dive Deep, Look Hard. It's all out there.

These dark and stormy days call for extra-vigilance in searching for exceptional seafoods. Some distributors have resigned themselves to Farmed Salmon, Panko-Breaded Ocean Pout and Arkansas Chicken--But you don't need to settle! We here at Jones Ranch are hard at work keeping wild and wonderful offerings in front of you. Pink Scallops are back for the duration, oysters are prime right now and Urchin is well and available. Look for daily flashes and updates on Sturgeon, Steelhead, Razor Clams and East Coast Fishes. Also, please consider.....

West Coast Albacore Loin.

We do it funky and pass the savings on to you.

For years one of our favorite products has been the West Coast Albacore. Fresh season runs from July-September annually and we enjoy, sell, and promote as much of this fish as we can in fresh form. West Coast Albacore is flavorful, deep and has a much more complex taste than the warm water or Fiji product typically seen in the business. To us it is one of the true glories of Northwest Seafood, right up there with Pink Scallops, Salmon and Black Cod.

Most of the fish are bled and blast frozen at sea, or FAS, as the industry terminology goes. This is a terrific thing for the albacore--they do not hold up well fresh, over a few days their flesh goes grey and begins to gap. The flavor remains, but the fish becomes challenging for center-of-the-plate presentations. Bled and Blasted Albacore retain the superlative properties of a truly fresh West-Coast Albacore.

Back in the day, most West Coast product was re-shipped and canned--largely in American Samoa. In the past few years a new product has developed--a sashimi grade vacuum packed, 100% usable meat loin. This product is produced by band-sawing the whole fish in sub-zero conditions, trimming skin and bloodline off with grinders and then glazing and vacuum packing the finished loin--all while the fish is still frozen. The effect of all this is to produce a finished, 100% usable product that has the integrity of a FAS fish--unlike many tuna options, the fish is never thawed.

FAS Albacore loins are good enough to be served raw, and showy enough to be a star center-of-the-plate. They are MSC certified, the only tuna fishery to earn this distinction--Albacore trolling has effectively no bycatch and the resource is strong and growing. Plus they are extremely convenient-zero waste, zero shrinkage.

The past few years have seen a down cycle for Albacore fishing in our waters. The fish have been farther off-shore than usual and our West Coast fleet has struggled to maintain production. Consequently, pricing on this product has risen year-by-year and the primary producers of the product are always oversold.

We have been offered a volume of these loins at a very nice price. Our motto here at Jones Ranch is, "We do it funky and pass the savings on to you." Come and get them!

Christmas Coho.

A Rare and Seasonal Beast.

A little known joy of Washington fisheries is the secret run of Coho that trickle in after Chum salmon have been and gone. Returning in small numbers to rivers throughout the basin, this is an extremely low-volume, Tribal-Only fishery. The flavor is more subtle than summer/fall coho. It holds the Coho delicacy and fattiness we all treasure, but with a hint of melancholy mixed in-- a fish to remind us of pleasures behind and pleasures ahead. Christmas Coho.

Wild Sturgeon, By and By

Bit by Bit, we will keep you fed.

We expect another shot of wild sturgeon for Monday. Order Now!!! These fish never last long!! Available in 30# average bullets and filet.

Oyster of the Month

Congratulations to Miss December!

Our Oyster of the Month for December is the Calm Cove. A light, supple oyster, the Calm Cove is the Queen of Hood Canal Oysters. This oyster has slowly grown on us and has become our own Happy Hour Oyster of Choice. Grown by the same folks as grow the Hammersley, the Calm Cove benefits from the same attention, care and passion. Beach finished, the Calm Cove is well polished, retains liquor and has an inimitable, quintessentially Hood Canal finish, light and clean but with the rounded depth and richness of a fully finished oyster. Special Pricing for the Month of December!!

Razor Clams In the House!

Cutting through your winter blues.

Our Coastal Clam Digger friends are taking advantage of the clement weather and low tides this week to make some traction on razor clams. We expect to have live razors available Thurs/Fri. and for an extended spell thereafter.

Urchin Update!!

In spite of last weeks' foul weather, our intrepid divers made it out midweek and we are delighted to have abundant urchin for the end of the week and beginning of next week. Quotas are winding down and the fleet has voted itself reduced weekly catch limits to feather out the end of the season. At this point we expect to have urchin through the New Year, but we are definitely on the back side of the season. In honor of the beginning of the seasonal wind-down of the Mighty Urchin, we have dedicated this weeks' Science Corner to our spiny friends. The least you can do is dedicate a corner of your menu to this Hometown Hero.

Science Corner--All Hail the Echinoidea!!

A Lovely, Curious Animal.

The Lusty Urchin

Here at Jones Ranch we have a special place in our hearts for Urchins. Uni is one of our absolute favorite foods, and we anticipate the opening of Urchin season each fall with bated breath and sweaty palms. We have two commercially-harvested species in these waters. the Green and the Red. Worldwide some 950 species creep around the seafloor. Urchins are to Northwest Cuisine as truffles are to French cookery--the ultimate, ephemeral, essence food. The edible portion of an urchin is the Uni, or gonads and quality improves through the fall, with the ripening of the gonads. Sometime in late winter, based on some temperature or environmental cue, the urchins spawn and the uni is spent and no longer desirable. Urchins have a very long and involved free-swimming larval stage, they can swim for as long as 50 days, during which time the key development is growth of ever-increasing numbers of arms, during which time they feed on microalgae, or phytoplankton. Eventually they settle and begin life as baby urchins as we know them. Well-Fed urchin seem to spawn yearly, but success of the spawn, as measured in recruitment of baby urchins is highly iffy--sometimes years and years will pass without successful urchin reproduction, though a year with prime conditions for larval and settler Urchin can yield fantastic numbers of babies.

The promise of Tomorrow.

The Edible Urchin.

We primarily sell urchin live and whole for table-side dismemberment. We also do offer, from time-to-time, a fresh-shucked uni tubbed in salt water. Shelf-life on fresh uni is around 5 days in the shell and maybe 10 days tubbed in brine. Most processors treat uni with alum, which changes the flavor, stiffens up the uni and extends shelf-life to several weeks. The alum-treated uni is a fine product, flavor-wise, but is different enough from the fresh to qualify as an entirely different thing. Frozen is even more so.

The Real Thing.

The Resilient Urchin.

Uni quality varies wildly year to year, area to area and even among a given group of urchins--this is a major point--inexperienced or heedless divers can pick huge volumes of urchin, but to pick quality product is an art and a science. Urchins are one of the toughest and most resilient of sea creatures. Their primary diet is kelp and rooted seaweeds. They can plow through phenomenal volumes of sea foliage when conditions are right, but when conditions turn against them they can live for years in a sort of fugue state, subsisting on micro-algae and rock. During these spells the Uni, or urchin gonads become almost non-existent. When kelp returns they get right back to work, though it is generally a few years before the Uni quality is back up. Something like this is happening right now in California. El Nino conditions destroyed kelp beds along vast expanses of California coastline. The urchins are fine, but their uni is so degraded as to be un-harvestable. Now, kelp is making a comeback and the California urchin should be back on point in a year or so.

The Immortal Urchin.

This capacity to go dormant is just one Urchin Fun Fact. The bulk of living tissue is around the outside of the shell, in a undulating, living skin anchoring and animating the spines along with tens of thousands of tendrils with suction cups. These suction cups fasten and release to allow the urchin to scuttle along at speed. They have a unique, five-ways symmetry with 5, 2-fold vascular systems feeding the living skin covering through thousands of pin-prick holes through the shell. The urchin mouth is suspended at the center of the bottom of the shell in a remarkably mechanical-looking arrangement, and is made up of five self-sharpening teeth. This is known as an Aristotle's Lantern. These teeth can chew through rock. In some areas urchin will excavate little cubbies for themselves out of live rock. Urchins are highly coveted by predators and are subject to a variety of diseases. Outside of that, however, urchin have no physiological reason to die. They do not age or degrade. Urchin can regenerate themselves indefinitely and as such are theoretically immortal.

Aristotle's Lantern.

The Talented Urchin

Our diver friends tell of urchin behaving like a herd animal far beneath the surface--they move together in coordinated groups. Experienced divers will target urchins for quality at specific points around the herd--middle of the pack animals tend to be poor. While Urchin typically haunt the photic zone--the top 8- or so feet of the seabed where macro algae grows, herds of urchin are known to descend to depth to cross to greener pastures on the far side of big water. Urchins have played a significant role in various forms of applied medicine and science, given their unique, but easily observed properties. The cutting edge of human longevity research is focused on studying Urchin, and modern In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) techniques developed out of observations of Urchin fertilization, much of which research took place at the Friday Harbor Labs, just across the water from us.

Otter Eating Urchin. How the competition does it.

The Storied Urchin.

Eating urchin was long a staple of Coastal natives and the ever-adventurous Japanese, Urchins were neglected and scorned by Puget Sound settlers and Fisher-Folk. Fur-trade driven eradication of Sea otters Coast-wide led to a gigantic boom in Urchin abundance. Urchin in their turn largely eradicated kelp forests. This is the reality that pioneer-era water-folk experienced in Puget Sound. Then in the late 1960s something odd happened. As Japan pulled itself out of it's post-war wreckage and began to become rich, a desire for traditional foods pushed Japanese buyers to alien shores. Early urchin fishers used rakes and dip nets along with some disastrous attempts at dragging for urchins. Then eager trainees in the new discipline of SCUBA diving figured out that there was money to be made in prancing along the sea floor, picking up urchins, in tandem with this, kelp beds came roaring back, fueling another boom in urchin abundance. By the mid-80s the urchin boom was in full swing, with bonanza volumes and pricing. Maine has a robust urchin fishery, as does Atlantic Canada. On this coast California has always been the center of gravity for Uni production, with a small fishery in Oregon, a robust resource in Puget Sound and fitful production in Canada and Alaska. This was an exclusively export-oriented business with huge money. Your Fish-O-Gram correspondent remembers when urchin divers were the high-rollers and big-spenders of the San Juans fisher-folk. Then the Japanese economy crashed in tandem with a down-tick in the resource. For twenty years or so the urchin fishery settled down to a low murmur, with a handful of die-hard divers plugging away at very low prices. Quotas were never filled, instead the fishery would taper off late winter when the urchin spawning began, and in Puget Sound the tribal quota was fished little if at all. During this spell a robust domestic market gradually developed. Starting with sushi bars and spreading ever-outward in the fancy food world, West Coast Uni is now primarily consumed domestically.

The Coveted Urchin.

Onward to the Middle Kingdom.

These last four years urchin pricing has roughly doubled, one year to the next. Divers are now making real money for the first time in decades. Puget Sound Quotas are now fully subscribed, both for state-licensed and tribal fishers. California production has slowed at precisely the moment Uni has gone mainstream. We are delighted to see Urchin get the acclaim and menu space it deserves. Looking forward we expect decent abundance through mid-January, mostly from tribal boats. Urchin are the ultimate distillation of the Salish Sea, their variations and inconsistency an endless pageant. Even their fickle nature makes part of their appeal--urchin refuse to adapt to living in tanks--when we or others try to hold urchin in tanks, even with abundant kelp for food, the uni quality degrades within a matter of days. Right now the Salish Sea is well stocked with harvest-size urchin and from our perspective, the uni has never been better. Looking ahead, our divers report that recruitment has been poor these past few years, indicating lean years ahead--this is strictly cyclical, not indicative of any long-term trends--they will be back. Alaska urchin fisheries have collapsed with the resurgence of Sea Otters, as have California urchin fisheries in otter-colonized areas. As such, we expect urchin to become ever more precious, expensive and sought-after. Further, Chinese buyers are now getting in on the action. China has zeroed in on Urchins in the same way China now hoovers up fine cognac and prime beef--Uni is now identified a prime luxury food from the West. Several new Chinese -owned brokerages have set up shop in Seattle recently with the notion of mass-exporting reds. This new trade route will be in full swing by next year and will likely put a serious hurt on local urchin supply channels. Right now, urchins are readily available, quality is phenomenal and pricing is still reasonable. Salish Sea/Puget Sound Urchin is as good as it has ever been, and will ever be. These are the days when......

Oyster Tasting December 5 Franks Oyster House.

Please join us Tuesday at Franks Oyster House for an oyster/scallop tasting. 5 pm 'till the bivalves are gone.

Until next time, we are your Scallop Friending, Chicken-Eschewing, Albacore Hounding, Calm-Cove Shucking, Christmas-Coho-ing, Ugly-Fish Cutting, Urchin Researching, JFF Crew. CALL OR WRITE TODAY!!!

N&S

Fish-O-Gram #28--Holiday Schedule. The Harmful Algae Blooms Edition. Greenies are A-OK!! A Flood of Spot Prawns!! Crab prices hit low point for 2017!! Pink Scallop Countdown!! Oyster tasting at Franks, December 5.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 02:24:00 +0000

Dear Storm-Lashed Customers,

Meanwhile down at the docks.

Holiday Schedule. No Deliveries Thursday or Friday (Nor on Weekend).

SEATTLE DELIVERIES- Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Closed Th & F.

SAN JUAN ISLAND DELIVERIES- Tuesday ONLY.

SKAGIT DELIVERIES- Monday Only.

BELLINGHAM DELIVERIES- Wednesday Only.

OUT OF AREA SHIPMENTS- Monday shipping Only for urchin/crab. Fresh/Frozen Fish & shellfish shipping Mon-Wed.

It's going to be a good winter.....

Fall is now officially the mode of the day on the water and at Jones Ranch. Coho is definitively done--the last few we have seen have been nasty and snaky--bruise-colored flesh and thin belly walls. Best to let them spawn at this point. Halibut has been relegated to memory and frozen product. From here on 'till mid March West Coast Fish availability will be subject to weather, limited as far as species availability and generally squirrely. Fortunately, JFF has been diving and digging deep and far afield to keep you covered. Urchin fisheries continue strong and the urchins themselves are beyond lovely. Remember--every blow this time of year works to stretch out the urchin quota. Spot Prawns are suddenly, unaccountably, exploding out of the woodwork. Eastern fisheries are robust and varied, with good abundance of John Dory, Monk and various exotic offerings. Best of all, we are now on the one-week countdown to renewed Pink Scallop harvest and sales!!

Back on Point

Green is the New Uni!!!

We have not sold green urchins the last few years due to concerns about quality and consistency. The reds seem to be going from strength to strength, year by year, quality-wise, while the greens have lagged behind. Based on a batch we sampled last week, we are delighted to report that the greenies are back on. Green Urchin uni is sweeter, smoother and milder than red. We consider it a "gateway" Uni--perfect for gentler palates and new Uni-eaters. So from here on out, Green, as well as Red, means Uni.

Travis and friend.

Crab Pricing Falls to 2017 Low!!!!

California Coastal crab opened Weds and we expect volume to be excellent. Crab pricing has fallen to the lowest levels in 2017. Washington and Oregon Coasts are held up due to low meat yields in test catches, but overall abundance looks excellent and when those fisheries open, prepare for a crustacean deluge. Here in Puget Sound our tribal fleets are banging away with the best catches being in the San Juan Islands. State crabbers will likely go back on the water around the holidays. What this means is a unique combination of abundant supply and moderate pricing. Now is the season to run a crab program. As ever, unlike the broadliner competition, we specialize in Puget Sound Crab, the Acme of Dungeness Crab.

Spot Prawn Bonanza!

Prawn-O-Rama!

After years of poor and fitful spot prawn availability and extremely high pricing, we now have an abundance of high-quality frozen prawn tail options. We have size-graded 2016 product for excellent prices, O/R 2017 production at reasonable prices and size-graded 2017 tails for acceptable prices. Your choice!. Some of our fussiest customers have been delighted with the 2016 and are buying large volumes to secure availability. The frozen-in-brine prodcut pictured is the finest retail pack we have ever seen. Check the pricelist--Don't let the best prawns in the world slip by!

Prepare for the Pink-Out!!!

The Scallop Fishery is almost in Hand

Pink Scallops are Almost Back!!

It's almost time to welcome back the elusive princess of your seafood menu, the legendary Pink or Singing Scallop. The extreme seasonality of the scallop only makes them more precious in our minds, but there again is a story to be told.
After a barn-burning spring of scallop harvest and sales, things came to a screeching halt in mid-June as PSP, or red tide levels hit dangerous levels. Since then the Scallops in our storage system have stubbornly held onto PSP levels oscillating just around the danger zone. It has been deeply frustrating. This week we finally realized a safe test result on both our storage-held scallops and product fresh from the harvest grounds. Assuming we get clean results come Monday, we are back in the scallop business. Given the holiday, figure first deliveries the week of the 27th. Long-time Fish-O-Gram readers understand the epic struggle that bringing the scallop fishery back on line has been. Every scallop harvested and sold is a victory and a triumph--a triumph for culinary endeavor and the human spirit over the nightmare molasses of fish bureaucracies. But the creature that has bedeviled us these past months is not on the government payroll.

I don't work for the City, I don't work for the State

Science Corner, HAB Edition.

We here at Jones Ranch have become fascinated by Biotoxin-producing algae. After all, we have a positive relationship with phytoplankton in general. We grow it at the shellfish hatchery for our baby oysters, wild algae is the fodder that grows our oysters and feeds the salmon we treasure. The magically-named Noctiluca scintillans (translation: twinking night light) creates the phosphorescence, or fire in the water that is the joy of night-time seagoers world wide.
Algae is the building block of life in the watery reaches of the world and it supplies 80% of the oxygen we consume and is by far the largest driver in global carbon cycles--this is fascinating topic, by the by. Our third child grows algae in jars on the kitchen table.

We love Algae

When Algae Goes Bad....
F.O.G. would go so far as to claim an affinity with and affection for phytoplankton that most people have with puppies or sloths. How then to consider algae turned bad? Harmful Algal Blooms, or HABs as they are known in the business, cause massive harm--from the potentially fatal Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning to the hazards of Domoic Acid, caused by blooms of Pseudo-nitzschia phytoplankton, to the newly emerged threat of DSP, or Diaretic Shellfish Poisoning, which is at is sounds. HABs cause huge disruptions in seafood supply--though generally blooms are not generally harmful to lower-order marine organisms. Plankton-eating shellfish and some species of fish and crab concentrate the compounds. When these creatures are in turn eaten by animals with central nervous systems, like otters, whales and humans, trouble arises. Otters in particular seem to be subject to heavy mortality from eating tainted clams.

Beware the Birds.

Some impacts from HABs are downright whimsical, Nitzschia navis-varingica can cause temporary amnesia in humans and animals, or Amnesic Shellfish poisoning. Alfred Hitchcock drew from a real-life invasion of confused, belligerent seabirds in Capitola California in 1961, presumably caused by a Nitzschia navis-varingicabloom in nearby waters, to flesh out the horror film, "The Birds" More recently, a deranged Pelican flew through the windshield of a motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway in 2006. Accident investigators fingered AmnesicShellfish poisoning as the aggravating factor. Washington State Department of Health has monitored for HABs since the early 1940s and the program has developed into the best and strongest in the nation. Yet for all the resources dedicated to identifying HABs and mitigating their impacts on humans and seafood supply, remarkably little is known about the whys and wherefores--there seems to be no good reason for plankton to create toxins--it is costly to the organism and does not seem to benefit the algae, and yet a wide range of them do. Some toxic algae, like Pseudo-nitzschia, turn their toxin-producing capabilities on and off based on unknown environmental or biological cues. At times plankton monitoring will identify huge abundance of Pseudo-nitzschia with little or no toxin being produced. Others species, like Alexandrium catenella, the PSP, or saxitoxin producing algae, are always on--when present, they are producing PSP toxin. Because producing toxin is so costly to the algae, species producing toxins are generally very narrowly adapted. This is good in one sense, as they are not fit to compete with the general run of phytoplankton, and so blooms are rare. But when conditions line up, the harmful species have the capacity to explode in abundance and dominate the ecosystem for a period of time. The best operating theory is that these particular species of algae were, sometime in the dim genetic past, colonized and co-opted by toxin-producing viruses.

Different species of shellfish concentrate, clear and hold the toxin at vastly different rates. Mussels are typically the fastest to accumulate toxin and the quickest to release it. Because of this sensitivity, mussels are typically used as the sample species to monitor PSP. Butter clams and geoducks are the slowest both to take up toxin and then to release it--a geoduck farmer friend some years back faced a full year of harvest closure. His ducks went hot in mid-spring one year, stayed mildly hot through the summer months, then went into dormancy without clearing the toxin. Jerry Borchert, PSP guru for the DOH, speculates that different species have various degrees of "stickiness" for saxitoxin in gut lining and soft tissue. And our geoduck friend? After a year with no revenue his business more or less collapsed. Taylor Shellfish took over his leases and last we heard he was renovating and flipping houses in Tucson Arizona.

The long-term impacts of PSP

Biotoxins are always with us.

Harmful algaes are nothing new. Coastal dwellers have known of toxic algae, and known that it concentrates in filter feeders, as long as people have lived on the coast. Local natives would feed suspect shellfish to dogs before consuming it themselves. San Juan County herbalist and folklorist Ryan Drum tells a story of a feast sometime in the early dawn of European contact wherein Vancouver Island natives deliberately fed toxic mussels to Spanish fur traders, with predictable results. Biotoxins are not all bad, the Japanese have used Pseudo-nitzschia derived compounds as wormers for millennia. Modern medicine is finding all kinds of uses for these compounds, including as highly effective treatment for anal fissures. Both the range and frequency of toxic algal blooms seems to be increasing. This may be a result of warming seas, nutrient loading, better tracking and detection, some form of cyclical variation, or all of the above. Some years in Puget Sound are bad biotoxin years, some are not. The last few years have been quite benign, though we did have an unexpected spike in this last October.

Same as it ever was

Scallops and PSP.

The primary tool WA DOH uses to monitor PSP outbreaks is a robust predictive model based on 70 years of testing and tracking PSP outbreaks. If X area turns up hot, more than likely area Y will follow. Areas typically prone to PSP are monitored regularly during weather conditions generally associated with Alexandrium blooms. What this means in practical terms is that if Chuckanut and Mackaye Harbor turn up hot, Jerry Borchert will begin rounding up samples from the next tier of sites, say Eastound, Olga and Shoal Bay. This system works very well. Washington State commercial shellfish has been remarkably safe for many decades, in spite of increasing seasonal and geographical occurrence of HABs. The particular glory of Alexandrium is an uncommonly strong swimming ability--therefore they flourish in times of striated water conditions, with limited mixing between water layers. When upper layers of water become depleted of nutrients other, less mobile plankton fade out. Alexandrium are able to swim down to deeper water, tank up on nutrients, then hoist themselves back up to bask in the sunlight. They typically thrive in areas of clean, clear water with high salinity--this is why the Straits frontage of the Olympic Peninsula is so prone to shellfish closures. Contrary to popular belief, Alexandrium are not more common in heavily polluted areas—the areas in our state most prone to outbreaks actually have the cleanest water. When conditions turn less favorable for the Alexandrium, large numbers of the algae will cocoon themselves and form dormant cysts that can live on the seabed for years or decades. Ultimately, when conditions warrant, the algae react to some unknown cue, break out of their cyst, swim to the surface and begin merrily photosynthesising, dividing and creating toxin as if they'd never quit. Many algae species have a cystic cycle-this is what the vast biomass of deep-water filter feeders subsist on, and there is no way to predict when and how deep-water feeders will come upon a batch of cystic Alexandrium. DOH's predictive models are of little use in tracking PSP levels in deep-water species like scallops. Further, DOH had very little data on how and with what speed scallops uptake the toxin and how and with what speed they release it.

It's the quiet ones you need to watch out for.

JFF, Expanding the Boundaries of Human Knowledge.
The old-time scallop fishery foundered on this problem--every harvest batch needs to be tested. A scallop with an effective shelf life of three or four days cannot be harvested, held out of the water for the duration of a test and then delivered to market with any degree of success. Our process is that harvested scallops are transferred to our holding system and held in water while the test is going through. Being held in our growing area means no surprises--This allows us to ship guaranteed fresh and guaranteed clean scallops. Our thinking going into this exercise was that hot scallops transferred into the tanks, as happened last June, would rapidly purge themselves of saxitoxin, given the high metabolism of a swimming scallop. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. Scallops have proven to take up the toxin faster than mussels and release it more slowly than almost any other creature. Certain weeks side-by-side testing showed no detectable toxin in mussels while at the same time PSP levels in the scallops were spiking. This is wonderfully interesting from a research perspective, but frustrating from a commercial point of view. Moving forward we are going to begin using a pregnancy-checker-esque PSP test as a pre-screen for scallops to help us target harvest and reduce the strain on the DOH lab, not to mention the lab mouse population. This too will be deeply interesting.

Red means what?

Scallops to the Rescue!!!

So bust out your pink party hats, whip up some mignonette and pour another glass of sancerre. The scallops, safe, certified and island-fresh are headed to your menus. Just in time for the holidays and just in time to relieve the seasonal-seafood doldrums. It's going to be a good winter. New customers; please take a moment to check out our archive of Scallop-themed information and the excellent roster of press about the return of the scallop fishery at our website, jffarms.com.

As for Jerry Borchert, Audrey Coyne, Clara Hard and the other good folk involved with the DOH biotoxin program, who have an unparalleled record for keeping diners safe while enabling the Washington State Shellfish industry to grow and thrive, JFF salutes you.

And for those of you who enjoy harvesting your own, yes, the advisories are for real and also apply to gooseneck barnacles. Recent years have seen dramatic increases in the number of Rainier-Swilling hipsters on culinary safari prying barnacles off the South End of Lopez. Here at Jones Ranch we are deeply concerned about this from a public health perspective. There is no current DOH testing of barnacles, nor is there any data we can find on their PSP uptake and retention properties. All real food involves risk, but pushing the biotoxin envelope is not a wise move. We confine our barnacle eating to deep winter months for these reasons.

Be safe. Lay off the barnacles.

Please join us for an oyster and pink scallop tasting event at Franks Oyster House 5-8pm December 5!!!!

In our expanded capacity as Marinelli Shellfish Reps we will be holding as many of these vents as we can find venues to do so in coming months. Please reach out if you would like to host one.

The last event, at the White Swan Public House was a storming success, as was Elliot's Oyster New Year last weekend. We are delighted to report that the Hammersley, our November Oyster of the Month, swept the prize board at Oyster New Year. Congratulations Troy Morris and the entire Calm Cove crew!!!!!!

Until next time we are your Green Urchin-Cracking, Freezer-Diving, Scallop-Sciencing, Safely-Barnacle Harvesting, Award-Winning Oyster-Selling JFF Crew!

Call, Email or text.

Nick & Sara

Fish-O-Gram Digest!! Oyster Tastings!! Urchins are Going Fast! Fall Crab Exceed Expectations!! Spot Prawn Surprise!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 02:30:00 +0000

Dear Snow-Surprised Customers,

Friday Morning at Jones Ranch

Much to our shock and horror last night's gentle rain turned into an inch or so of nasty white powder along with a driving Northeast wind. Packing shellfish this morning was a deeply painful experience.

However, the children enjoyed it, and it is a timely reminder that it is time to set aside the last vestiges of high-season seafood and pick up wintery menu items. Halibut closes November 7 after a solid, satisfying season. Coho and a few straggler kings are still trickling in, and the newly opened Alaska winter troll fishery is off to a sputtering start, but salmon is pretty well wrapped up. Black Cod is generally available from our Neah Bay friends and will remain so through the holidays. Rockfish, cod and smaller flatfish are, for the moment, readily available. Order at will, but consider the fruits of the season we find ourselves in. JFF has an inside track on the shellfish, specialty and frozen products to nurse you through the long months 'till West Coast finfish kick back in.

Sales Plugs and Highlights:

Urchin.

Urchin continues into November, with spectacular quality, flavor and high uni yields. Casey Palermo of the Willows Inn on Lummi reports that this season's uni is the nicest he has ever seen. That's the good news. The bad, unfortunately, is that with demand skyrocketing and prices climbing, the urchin fishery, long a genial throwback to the days of old-time fisheries, has become another crazed race to finish quota. Divers are on a 2000#/wk quota for both reds and greens. With a total state quota for each of around 260,000# and 25-some boats diving, the quotas are going fast. For the first time ever, we find ourselves rooting for nasty weather to just slow things down a little. The tribes, of course, have an equal quota. They are moving a little slower on harvest but we should all expect the entire fishery to be wrapped up by the new year. Anything beyond that will be a joy and a bonus.

Never been better

Crab.

This summer sport and tribal crab harvests were uniformly disappointing, with few and small crab to be found in the usual hot spots. It seemed that the long-predicted, ever-postponed slump in crab numbers was upon us. Both state and tribal fleets kicked off their regular fall seasons October 1 with low expectations. The tribes pulled off the water after 6 days to focus on fall salmon fisheries, while the state fleet ran, as usual, through the end of the month. Despite all expectations October crab catches were tremendously strong. In 30 days the state fleet landed 2,039,000# out of a 2,760,000# quota. Now the tribes are back on the water and doing well. The unexpected strength of catches was enough to drive price down well lower than we expected. Prices are now up a bit, but still very reasonable. The Quinault tribe opens on the coast November 15, followed, hopefully, by the Washington and Oregon state fleets on December 1, and sometime around then California will kick off as well. Pricing should remain relatively stable and reasonable through the new year. Now is a great time to run a crab program.

Spot Prawn Surprise.

Alaska Spot prawn season is mostly wrapped up following another successful season. We are enjoying the first air-freighted 2017 prawn tails. Pricing is high but fair and quality is very high. However, in talking to one of our suppliers, we stumbled onto a stash of impeccable 2016 product that had been forgotten in the freezer. We sampled the prawns and are delighted to report that they are as good as new and much, much more reasonably priced. We have a limited quantity of 2016 available, and are happy to hold prawns if paid for in advance. Product is glazed, jumble-packed prawns in 2# boxes. Shout out for a sample.

Just as good as the new season product

Oyster of the Month.

A few weeks back, during and around our October Pig Roast, we conducted a marathon oyster tasting over three days with four different groups of tasters. The runaway favorite was the Hammersley Inlet extra-smalls. The Hammersleys, grown by Calm Cove Shellfish in South Puget Sound, is embarrassingly good. Beach grown, Hammersleys have the polish and depth of a mature South Sound oyster, but maintain a degree of delicacy not common in the lower regions of Puget Sound. Sizing is uniform, shells lovely and the Hammersleys have excellent shell closure and shelf-life attributes. Calm Cove has been on something of a seeding frenzy these last years, with the result that their beaches are fully stocked, oysters are allowed to come to full flavor fruition before harvest and pickers have enough variety to sort to exceptional consistent specs. This oyster has the unique distinction of being both the current favorite on our list, and the least expensive. For the month of November, the Hammersly is value priced for happy hour but good enough to match the best for Saturday night or Sunday morning.

Belle of the Ball

Why We Love Shellfish.

Please pay special attention to our oyster price list this week. We have added new offerings and adjusted pricing downward. Seattleites--come see us at Elliots Oyster New Year on the 11'th. We'll sneak you in the back through the crew bathrooms.

When it comes to seafood quality, F.O.G. is an unabashed partisan of the West Coast in general and Washington State in particular, not to mention our own little blessed corner of it all. Our native superiority shines through on shellfish like nothing else. Washington State has the largest, most productive and innovative shellfish growing sector in the nation and the finest, best tasting oysters in the world. Some of this supremacy is just luck--geography and hydrology, but a good portion is due to far-sighted policy and the endless dedication of the Washington State shellfish grower corps.

We've got something nobody else got....

We are, of course, absurdly blessed with our abundant coastline. From the Willapa to Totten Inlet, San Juan Islands to Oakland Bay, Washington State has a huge amount of shellfish-worthy marine territory. But lots of states do. Rhode Island is essentially a giant shellfish bed with just enough dry space around the edges for a few yacht clubs, a statehouse and some excellent strip joints. Washington actually ranks only 13th in the nation by rank of waterfront footage, the Chesapeake states have vastly more shellfishable waters and Louisiana, when not buffeted by hurricanes and oil spills, can produce circles around Washington State in volume.

A Quahog is a Rhode Island clam.

Our Own Private, Half-Shell, Washington.

What we do have is the world's best conditions for growing premium half-shell oysters. This comes down to two main factors, private ownership of tidelands and our status as the farthest north temperate growing area in the world.

Firstly, due to a biological quirk of our native Olympia Oyster--a full Fish-O-Gram on this to follow--Washington State has allowed for private ownership of tidelands. We are the only state in the nation to do so. This alone would be enough to guarantee an oyster sector without parallel. Other states have robust wild oyster fisheries, but a wild harvest model will never produce a consistent, high quality, raw-eating oyster. Other states and Canadian provinces have patched together complex lease and grant arrangements to allow growing on public lands, but this structure has hobbled the industry--leases are inherently squirrely, ever-subject to cancelation, revision and unrealistic conditions.

It's All About Latitude.

Most growing areas in the nation, and for that matter, in the rest of the world, are in locations with much less tidal range than Washington State. Cheaspeake Bay, for instance, ranges between a 1-3' tidal range, while our effective range is about 14' or greater. This is a function of lattitude--the closer to the equator, the smaller the tides, the more extreme the latitude, the greater the tides. Growing oysters in a limited tide flow area means less water circulation for one thing, and that oysters are grown on sub-tidal bottom or in suspension and never go through the exposure and immersion of on-beach tidal cycles. This can make for a weak, flaccid oyster with poor shelf-life and undeveloped flavors. All southern-grown oysters and most Antipodal oysters fit this description. On the northern reaches of the American and Canadian East Coasts and in Alaska, tidal range is huge, but harsh winters freeze out oysters growing in the inter-tidal range, again requiring sub-tidal suspension growing.

It's the tides that make us special.....

Thanks to the benign influence of the Japanese Current, we enjoy the farthest north, temperate growing climate in the world, along with some portions of Northern Europe. As such, most of our Washington State oysters are finished directly on the beach. As with humans, a little adversity goes a long way to building character, flavor and texture. Washington oysters have a polish, authority, shelf-life and fullness that is unique in the world. Furthermore, substrate strongly influences oyster flavor, as do variables in water quality, circulation, etc, gives us more truly distinct oyster flavors, bay to bay, inlet to inlet, than anywhere else. Our oyster list is the Marinelli Shellfish oysters list and has been carefully assembled from the best independent oysters over the decades by the Marinelli Crew. Washington state oysters are the best in the world and Marinelli Shellfish oysters are the best of Washington oysters.

Dig Deep Bivalve Event:

Industry peeps and serious oyster nerds are invited to join the crew of the White Swan and Nick Jones Weds. the 8th at 5:30 for a oyster tasting/clinic.
Jones' own Lopez Island Euro Flat, Olympia and Pacific oyster will be featured, as well as an assortment of Jones' top picks from the rest of the region, including Hammersley Inlet, Wolf Beach, Nisquallys and Flapjack Point oysters. The format will be casual and informative, with a blind taste testing and lots of insider oyster talk.
The White Swan crew will be mixing up their usual magic behind the bar and in the kitchen. Attendance and oysters are complementary, drinks and additional food will be charged as usual.
RSVP to sandy@whiteswanpublichouse.com

NEWS FLASH!!

There's a new tumbled oyster on the market: A Chico Bay from Dyes Inlet grown in the central sound near Silverdale. This tumbled beauty is claiming to be like a Shigoku, but fatter and with more character- Available to order for this week.

AND in case you missed it, Providence Cicero does it again with her Pink Scallop writeup...https://www.seattlet imes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/t he-beloved-pink-scallop-resurf aces-deliciously/

Don't Forget.

Oyster New Year- Saturday Nov 11th 5-8 pm at Elliott's Oyster House. We'll be there-tasting all of the latest and greatest. Come by and say Hello.

As the days draw shorter, don't despair! JFF has a full line of shellfish and frozen and specialty seafood items to see you through. Less halibut means more menu room for Uni!! As ever, we continue to offer the finest in finfish from other parts of the globe.

Call! Email! Text! We are your oyster taste-testing, prawn bargain-hunting, inter-tidal oyster-growing JFF Crew!

Nick & Sara & the Transport Team

Fish-O-Gram #26- Fish-O-Gram! Summer of Fun, Mutant Hunting in the San Juans! Fall Fisheries Underway!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Breaking News!! Urchin Season Opens Today!!!! Your Long, Hot, Uni-Less Nighmare is over!! Fall Crab Season Opens! Live Crab Pricing hits 2017 Low!!! $6.50# for Ocean Run $7.25 for 2# Graded!!

The Bounty of Fall....

Dear Un--Penned Customers,

Cooke Family Portrait

The last golden weeks of summer were occupied for us in chasing escaped Atlantic salmon from the Cooke Aquaculture pen collapse in Deepwater Bay off Cypress Island on August 19th. From start to finish, the great Cypress Fish Spill has been spectacular theatre. This has been our very own San Juans Truth-Is-Stranger-Than-Fiction . We have lacked for nothing, the gigantic, clueless, arrogant Canadian Cooke Company being shredded in the media commons, deeper investigation revealing crooked, ambulance-chasing environmental groups, the quiet backdrop maneuvering of NOAA Fisheries in conjunction with a notable peninsular tribe, hapless Washington State Bureaucrats, showboating politicians, the impacts of astral-projection on salmon, and most and best of all, the heroes of this saga, the ever-resourceful and hardworking Fisher men and women, both State and Tribal, who dealt with the escapees on the grounds. Played out on the airways, in print, and spread out hundreds of square miles of water. It was, for a time, the Greatest Show on Earth.

Your Fish-O-Gram correspondent was lucky enough to be in the thick of it--helming the F/V Solar Ice, a 40' fish tender with the mission of hauling as many Atlantics as possible to Bellingham Cold Storage to be delivered into the possession of the Lummi Nation and frozen as lawsuit fodder.

They call it seafood, F.O.G. calls it evidence.

Fish Farming in Washington

Fish farming began in Washington State in the early 80's at a variety of sites, powered by a series of generally fly-by-night operations. All fish farms are situated on deepwater bottomlands leased from the State Department of Natural Resources.   Most farms began by attempting to grow Pacific Salmon. These early times experiments were generally unsuccessful-Pacific Salmon do not thrive in captivity. Fish spills were common in those days, both from defective pen assemblies and, in some cases, from insolvent operators releasing fish they could no longer afford to feed. One such farm was situated in Shoal Bay, our shellfish farm site, years back. This farm, Aquasea, grew silver salmon and lost or released them, depending on whose story you believe, when their farm was on the financial ropes. Our lagoon became the site of a legendary outlaw fishery a few years later when the mature silvers came back to Shoal Bay and milled around in hopes of finding a spot to spawn.

Empire by the Bay

Fish Farming Grows Up

By the mid-90's the industry had settled down to four stable sites (Bambridge, Hope Island, Port Angeles and Cypress Island) and went over to growing Atlantic salmon. These were still pioneer days for fish farming and fish spills were common, ongoing and unremarkable. During this era your Fish-O-Gram correspondent remembers regularly catching Atlantics in the course of wild-salmon gillnet fisheries. This was a period of record-low prices for wild salmon, and, driven by fishing groups, salmon farms came under great pressure for their environmental impact and price competition. Among the high-minded, salmon farming came to be analogous with strip mining and slave-trading. Given this, and the ongoing struggles as the net pen industry settled into itself, no expansion of farms within Washington State was considered during this spell.

During the late 1990s and into the 2000's Smoki Foods assembled all four farms and radically improved the farms' process, infrastructure and oversight, including developing a 'natural farmed' label that became the industry standard for best aquaculture practices. This was also a period of radical environmental and efficiency improvements in the fish-pen industry. Some within the business make the claim that farmed salmon is the most sustainable form of protein production on earth. Pointing to the spacial efficiency of fish farming--production potential is almost 1 million pounds of fish per acre per year, and the feed conversion ratio--which now stands at 1.2# of feed needed to produce 1 pounds of farmed salmon.

Does this look like strip mining?

Whole Foods Sez: farmed salmon has a ".... mild, satisfying flavor and melt-in-your mouth texture...." and is ".... pleasing to kids and adults alike...."

These arguments, and Smoki's own improvements, were so convincing that Whole Foods featured Washington raised salmon, under the American Gold Seafoods label in Whole Foods markets far and wide. Whole Foods went so far as to publish a Q&A sheet trumpeting Smoki's practices, including the above quote. Smoki also brokered truces with the local public-interest community by making large, targeted 'donations' to prominent groups and causes. Interestingly, the last round of 'agreements' negotiated by Smoki expired in 2016. Icicle seafoods and Cooke, now owner of the farms, declined to re-up the 'donations'. Smoki sold the Washington farming operations to Icicle in 2007.

Hot Potato

Cooke Aquaculture purchased all four Washington State fish farms in 2016 with their purchase of Icicle Seafoods. At that time Icicle had been in a holding pattern for some years--During this interregnum icicle allowed maintenance to slide from the Smoki levels of excellence. Cooke is a gigantic company--with 2016 turn-over of of 1.8 billion dollars. Their pattern is to purchase distressed seafood assets--which Icicle certainly was, restructure and recapitalize them, then expand the footprint and production of their newly shiny assets. Cooke is used to operating in relatively remote, relatively poor regions such as Atlantic Canada and Chile. Cooke is used to being hailed as an economic savior and hero. In early 2017 Cooke filed a series of permit requests with various state agencies as part of their plan to upgrade the existing farms. In these permit filings Cooke documented the poor state of repair and poor siting of some of the facilities, including the Cypress pen that ultimately collapsed. Despite this knowledge, the Cooke Company continued to operate the pens and the various state agencies who reviewed these permit documents, raised no alarms.

Federal Follies

Meanwhile, since the mid-2000s, NOAA Fisheries has been quietly trying to build a coalition to expand finfish aquaculture. From NOAA's perspective, finfish farming is a booming global business and the US is falling badly behind our trading partners in developing this sector. In so doing we are, by their telling, missing out on jobs, revenue and faring very poorly in the balance of trade. In general terms, the US exports our premium product, namely wild salmon, and imports middling product, namely farmed fish. As of now the US imports 70% of our seafood consumption. NOAA has been pushing for expanded aquaculture on all coasts, in all states. In Washington State, in consideration of the political realities here, NOAA has focused efforts on advocating the Department of Ecology to take a more tolerant stance towards finfish aquaculture, which Ecology has done, and on bringing a treaty tribe on board to spearhead expanded net pen farming in Washington. One of the Olympic Peninsula tribes took the bait and has collaborated with NOAA to build NOAA's Manchester, Kitsap County facility into a powerhouse of finfish aquaculture research and development, including a net pen complex for production experiments. The plan developed was to site a string of offshore net pens in the Strait of Juan De Fuca. These pens were to be owned by the tribe, given regulatory and technical muscle by NOAA and operated by Cooke. Permits for the first of these were to have begun wending their way through the permitting process earlier this month. It is crucial to point out that, with the exception of this one tribe, the entire Washington State treaty community is vehemently opposed to an expansion of net pen farming. It is also important to underline the ongoing conflict between the mighty Lummi Nation--by far and away the largest and most powerful fishing tribe--and the Peninsular Tribes over fishing areas, or U&A (Usual and Accustomed) areas. Some observers have suggested that the (successful) effort to push Lummi out of the Southern Straits districts was a prelude to bringing in net pens--as these waters are no longer part of the Lummi U&A areas the tribe has much reduced standing to fight net pen expansion.

Moonstruck
On August 19th the first escaped Atlantic salmon showed up in Lummi nets on the Purse Seiner F/V Salish Sea, then working Pt Williams, 5 or 6 miles away from the Cypress site. Skipper Luke Kinley texted pictures of the unfamiliar fish to his mother, Ellie Kinley, who identified them as escapees, and raised a general alarm. Cooke initially denied an escape had occurred, then claimed it was very small, then infamously blamed the eclipse for damaging the structure. Aerial photos documented a twisted, wrecked mess of a fish farm. What had in fact happened, based on reports from a Confidential Informant within the Cooke organization, is that the previous week the pen had dragged anchor. This was likely caused by the huge weight of fish within it, over three million pounds, the heavy amount of marine growth fouling the nets, and the unfortunate placement of the pen side-saddle to prevailing currents. Re-adjustments to the anchoring system cinched the anchor lines down too far. The next, higher tide cycle pitted a reinforced anchor system against the inexorable upward force of a million pounds of buoyancy. Against this, the aged and tired pen frame simply crumpled and ruptured the nets. The structural damage was so severe that Cooke employees were unable to even access the platforms. Salmon poured out into Deepwater Bay by the tens of thousands.

And so Castles made of sand.....

Too Many Cookes in the Kitchen
For ten days Cooke dissembled and WDFW dithered. The estimated fish spill rose from a handful, to a few thousand, to a final number in the range of 160,000 fish. Escaped Atlantics showed up, in huge numbers throughout the entire Salish Sea. Lummi and State fishers continued to catch the fish in the ongoing Samish/Bellingham Bay fishery, but no targeted mop-up was authorized. Cooke themselves began beach seining the fish in Deepwater Bay until WDFW stopped them on the grounds that they were not properly permitted to recapture their own fish. Operators of net pens must have plans on file for dealing with a spill--much like an oil spill,the idea is that any escaped fish are to be immediately removed from open water in any way necessary or possible. Under Washington State law escaped farmed salmon are classified as pollution.  Despite this, WDFW did nothing for a full week and a half, other than encourage sports fishermen to go and catch the Atlantics. The Cooke Company maintained a blithe stance, downplaying the magnitude of the spill and asserting that fisher-folk should just relax and enjoy the opportunity to catch and eat the Atlantics as the fish bumbled into other fisheries.

On Friday, the 25th of August the Lummi tribe unilaterally opened Deepwater bay to their fleet as a clean-up measure. Lummi fisheries enforcement was ordered to stand by and protect their fleet from potential interference by WDFW enforcement. Faced with a fishery fait accompli, WDFW stood down. Over the next two weeks net fishing for the mutants would open, close, open again and then close in a demented bureaucratic kabuki dance as the fish spread ever-farther from Deepwater Bay. State-licensed commercial smelt fishers in the San Juans began chasing the fish as well.  All fishers took on the task as a public service and cleanup effort. There was no guarantee of payment, even now many fishers have not been paid a dime.

A 32000# deckload

Fish 'till your hands bleed
Catches were huge. Over the course of the fishery Lummi Nation fishers caught and packed away upwards of 45,000 fish. Fishers fished until their hands were bloody, their boats on the verge of sinking and their nets in shreds. Other tribes and state commercial fishermen caught maybe another 5-6000 fish. Sports fishers hooked 2000-some on top of that, some as far afield as Hood Canal and Northern Vancouver Island. Many more Atlantics would have been caught had the area been opened sooner to net fishers, and had the openings been maintained throughout.

We've got this. What were the bureaucrats waiting for?

Astral Projections Work
On board the F/V Solar Ice we followed the fisherfolk, day and night, up muddy embayments, through the islands and anywhere fish were sited or reported. At one point we asked San Juan Islands residents to call in with fish sightings. The San Juan Astral-projections group called to offer to send underwater impulses to drive the fish into nets.   Over the course of the exercise,we hauled close to 130,000 pounds of the rogue fish. As ever, the State-Licensed and Tribal fisherfolk distinguished themselves with their heroic labors, determination to turn a disaster into something positive, and by their fast-moving creativity as they adapted to fishing an alien species.

Another 500#, off the water

A Fish The Seals Would Not Eat

The fish holed up in three-sided, narrow bays and milled around waiting for someone to feed them. They jumped and swam in circles. The hook-and-line fishers who did best scattered catfood or gravel on the water to excite the fish. Commercial fishers set gillnets in elaborate spider webs or used beach seines to muscle the fish in. The Atlantics are surprisingly lovely from a distance, uniform and shiny. Any fisher-person loves a mass of fresh fish, and the recovery fishery was thrilling from that point of view. But once on board the difference became apparent. Up close their fins showed themselves ragged and frayed from constant rubbing against one another. Also, the Atlantics stink, they reek--where wild salmon have their various smells, species by species and all lovely,  Atlantics stink like wet dog food. They are heavier for their size than wild salmon, and where wild salmon are taut and rippled with muscle, Atlantics are pudgy and soft. Another tell is that the marine mammals, typically merciless predators on salmon hanging in gillnets, refused to touch the Atlantics. For all the Atlantics we handled we saw two small seal bites. A typical haul of a few hundred wild salmon will see a couple of dozen of them seal marked. Sea lice were completely absent, causing us to wonder if the fish had been chemically treated prior to the spill.

Catching and hauling the Atlantics was a surreal experience. Getting them off the water felt good, and catching a lot of anything is fun, but to load a boat with salmon that stink, that seals, coyotes of the sea, refuse to touch, that one had no desire to eat, or to encourage others to eat, felt very, very strange. Coupled with the smoky haze then blurring the sun and running for days and nights with no sleep, the whole experience verged on the hallucinatory and apocalyptic. Following a stiff southerly blow, the fish dispersed from Deepwater Bay and nearby haunts. A week or so of hunting dwindling groups of escapees throughout the San Juans followed, punctuated by maddening WDFW closures, 'till catches dwindled down to nothing. The last few schools captured were lethargic and beginning to waste away. None of the Atlantics we saw had been feeding successfully. Since then very few escapees have been seen since in other ongoing fisheries. Overall less than half the vagrant fish were recaptured. Our best guess is that the remainder simply died of starvation, fear and broken hearts, pining for their pens and regular feeding schedules. Scorned by the seals, disavowed by Cooke, the remaining fish have slipped to the seafloor to be somehow, someday, worked back into the food chain.

This Machine Kills Mutants

Show Me The Money
Cooke has yet to pay a dime to the Lummi Nation or to the State fisher-folk who caught these fish. Unfortunately, the State fishers have no group or politician advocating their case. The Lummi tribe borrowed money to advance an initial payment to their fishers, State fishers, and those who tendered and processed the state fish, have received nothing and WDFW has done nothing to prod Cooke to make things right. The most activity we have seen out of WDFW through all of this was when enforcement got involved in investigating a raid on one of the two remaining pens at Cypress. Apparently a fisherman got greedy and cut his way into an intact pen to extract more fish--enforcement found slashed webbing and a slime and blood trail across the farm decking. As far as we know no-one was charged.

The Cooke Company seemed completely blindsided by the hubbub. Their early press releases and responses were unimaginably flat footed. At one point a company spokesperson dismissed the spill as 'an economic loss to us' rather than a broader resource, tribal or fishery issue. Another high point came when Chris Phillips, Editor of National Fisherman, was told by a Cooke rep that State commercial fishermen should be content with the "chance to take home such a superior fish to eat", never mind that most fishermen would rather eat a grilled rat than a farmed salmon. Cooke may be a big dog when it comes to the Business of farmed fish, but in Washington State that just makes them a bigger target. Their approach stands in direct contrast to Smoki--which went to extreme lengths to fade into the woodwork.....

By Day/By Night/We Will Hunt the Escapees

Fish Spill Fallout

In all fairness, Washington State fisheries and tribal politics are often hard for locals to track, let alone outsiders. The ripples of the fish spill will be felt for years to come. Any expansion plans for finfish aquaculture in Washington State is off the table. The tribes, Lummi most particularly, are now fully dedicated to getting all fish pens out of Washington State waters. Washington State agencies will certainly be sued for failing to respond rapidly to the spill and for neglecting their duties by allowing documented, structurally deficient pens to hold fish. Cooke's DNR lease requires the operator to maintain net pen gear in good working order. One angle now being pursued is to force DNR declare Cooke in technical default, and revoke their bottomlands lease.

Cooke Be Gone

Cooke will most likely take a few more rounds of beating, gather up their marbles and move on to more hospitable shores. There is no future in Washington State for the vision that they, NOAA and the outlier Olympic Peninsula tribe had mapped out. WDFW, DNR and Washington State Department of Ecology also have some hard reckoning to do. Their collective failure to act on known structural issues is blatant negligence and Ecology's willingness to follow NOAA's lead in pushing net pens is counter to the best interests of our state. WDFW's failure to enact their own protocol for containing a fish spill, namely their reluctance to enable the state and tribal fishing fleets to chase these fish, is straight-up criminal. So too is WDFW's complete disinterest in prodding Cooke to pay State licensed fishers for their work. At one point the head of the State task force went on record as claiming that the Cooke Company had no obligation to pay to have fish pulled out of the water, then quickly backtracked when it was pointed out that paying for recovery efforts was a condition of Cooke's permit.

The Lummi Nation stands as the break-away hero of this debacle, as does the Washington State commercial fishing fleet, both state and tribal. It was commercial fishers who first noticed the escaped fish, it was the Lummi Nation that bucked WDFW to commence the cleanup effort, commercial fishers who took it on themselves to remove the escaped fish and commercial fishers who are now holding Cooke and State agencies' feet to the fire. The fish spill represents the most robust collaboration between State and Tribal fishers F.O.G. has ever seen. May there be more to come. May we all be grateful that a professional, agile, mosquito fleet of Commercial Fishermen was ready and willing to take on this task.

Many wild claims about the potential long-term damage from the fish spill have been tossed around by politicians and various public interest agitators. Fears have been raised that the escapees would spread disease to wild fish, cross-breed with Pacific Salmon, or that Atlantics would out-compete native fish for food and resources. From our perspective, F.O.G. finds these claims to be bunk.  Cooke's fish are pathetic, so highly bred as to be completely lacking in any survival instinct, guile or capability. Releasing a pen's worth of Atlantics into the Salish Sea is akin to releasing a hundred thousand Cornish Cross Broiler chickens from confinement farms into the African savanna. Competition with the locals is not going to be an issue. Furthermore in years past WDFW tried over and again to introduce Atlantics to Washington State and failed, with wild-origin Atlantic genetics--presumably much fitter than the pen fish. All those fish that escaped from pens during the 1990s, they are gone without a trace. No successful spawning of Atlantics has been documented in Washington State. As far as disease, generations of these fish have been held in porous net pens. If they harbor disease, any contagions have been open to wild salmon and the general marine environment all along. If disease is an issue--and it probably is--that cat has been out of the bag for a long time and the fish spill couldn't do much to increase the risk. Rather, the environmental and wild-fish risks from fish farming are chronic rather than acute--any one event probably doesn't do much to move the dial.

In our opinion, those making such claims are either misinformed or are being deliberately alarmist. This does not mean fish farming is appropriate for Washington State.   Ultimately, there is no good reason to have these creatures in our waters

Farmed Fish Harm Too

Time To Take A Stand

F.O.G. is firmly in the anti-net pen camp. The reason is simple, floppy, stinky, weak, confused, mutant off-shoots have no place, now or ever, in our lively waters, on our plates, or on the roster of JFF sales offerings. Seeing pen fish milling around our bays, finning over our growing oysters and piling up in our boats was a major reality check. Our conclusion is thus: Farmed salmon are to wild fish as pornography is to sex--if there is a place for farmed salmon it is not around here and not anything we care to be involved with.

Real Fish!!!!!

F/V Salish Sea, the boat that caught the first Atlantic, making a haul of wild Fraser River bound salmon.

As a delightful bookend to the Mutant Parade, we spent a magical day at Pt Roberts buying king and pink salmon headed to the Fraser River. We are delighted to report that our Hometown Hero Fisher-Folk are just as skilled at catching wild fish as catching mutants and far happier to do so. The seals feasted, the boat smelled sweet, we cooked and ate fish till it ran out our ears--it was a wonderful trip.

Fall Fisheries Underway!!!!Urchins Return October 2!!! Pink Scallops are coming....Any week now!!

Nooksack Coho and local crab are now fully available. The crab resource looks to be having a down year, after a string of banner seasons, and both State and Tribal fishing sectors are being much more strategic about the layout of the fishery. Accordingly, we should all expect to see October/November crab pricing higher than usual--but still substantially lower than summer pricing. Nooksack Coho are here and are one of our favorite fish of the year. Their unique quality is due to their diet, consisting largely of dungeness crab larvae. So dining gives the Nooksack coho a color, flavor and depth all their own. For more information on the Nooksack Coho please refer to last years' Fish-O-Gram on the Nooksack fish.http://jffarms.blogspot.com/20 16/09/fish-o-gram-returns-nook sack-coho.html. To order this superlative fish please call or email. Urchins are on as of today!! We will be offering whole live red and green urchin and also jugged, uncured red urchin uni in 4# tubs. As far as scallops go, we are waiting for the last traces of red tide to die down. If all goes well we should be sending the first scallops to market on the 4'th of October. A full fall of delights ahead!!!

The Science is Clear. Nooksack Coho are best.

Until Next time, we are your Mutant-Hauling, Evidence-Collecting, Pen-Shredding, Pornography-Eschewing, Coho-Probing, Scallop-Testing, Uni-Jugging JFF Crew.

Please Join us on Lopez Saturday the 6th of October for a Pig Roast. Camping Available! Live Music! Free Beer! Target Shooting!!

N&S Jones & Famil

Grain is in! Record Smelt Catch! Scallop Update! Baker River Sockeye!!! Spring Fisheries + Crab Summer Series....Let the games begin!!! Restaurant Review--Lopez Welcomes Ursa Minor!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:37:00 +0000

Dear Unseasonably Cold Customers,

The Barley is Up!
2017 has been quite a spring. Puget Sound Spring fisheries have been delayed, sidetracked and generally unsatisfying. Alaska fisheries have been just fine, but the big-ticket fisheries are only now getting kicked off. As far as JFF farming activities, things are textbook. Following a late start due to the wetness, we got the last of our grain crops in Sunday the 4th, just before the weather turned. So our fields are turning to carpets of green as the plucky little shoots enjoy moderate temperatures and abundant moisture. Barring some freakish weather happenstance this summer or fall, a plague of grasshoppers or other such act of celestial nastiness, we are dialed for an excellent crop!!!

Lopez Smelt Bonanza!!!

Of the many kinds of smelt available, river smelt, ocean smelt and surf smelt, we prefer our islands surf Smelt. They are larger, sweeter and, handled by us, fresher than any other we have seen or handled.
Randy O'Bryant, our smelt fisherman, is a fisher of opportunity. He goes smelting around the tides, weather, WDFW imposed opening limits, availability of help, condition of his back and another few hundred variables. Fishing smelt does not mean catching--the technique is to set a curled net off the beach for a few hours on either side of the top end of the tide, ideally at dusk, and wait for a marauding school of smelt to swim along on its way to spawn on the beach. More often than not the catch is nothing, or small enough that it ends up getting parcelled out o the fisher-help. But a good catch can be huge. Back in the day smelt seining was the winter occupation for salmon fishermen or loggers when the woods got too wet and nasty. Fried, pickled, grilled or sauteed, smelt are a rare treat. Mild and flavorful, they have all the strange, bony glamour of herring or sardines but a cleaner, fresher flavor.
At one time all the islands' beaches were fished, at least occasionally, and to this day, a fair handful of smelt nets lurk in garages and tumbledown sheds. These days Randy is the last one with an active fishery, he even built a completely new net a few years back. His smelt haunt is a small pocket beach on the South side of Mud Bay, on the South End of Lopez. Our local smelt come to the island to spawn year-round, with fish having dramatically different qualities at different times of year. Uniquely, they spawn at the very top end of the tidal range, meaning the eggs, once laid, spend substantial amounts of time out of the water. This means that smelt are easily caught while spawning. A few years back our boys used baseball caps to catch spawning smelt down the beach from the shellfish farm. Winter smelt are small and shiny, summer smelt are larger and fatter. Late spring we usually see a few catches of glorious, pendulous, orange-bellied smelt. These smelt, bursting with roe and milt, are the high-point of the years' smelt. Like every other form of marine life, Smelt are highly cyclical and the last few years have marked a down cycle, and we have come to expect smaller and less frequent catches. That said, this spring we have seen signs of rebounding smelt. Mornings at the shellfish farm, the beach has been littered with dead, spawned out smelt that didn't quite make it back into the water.

The White Stuff is Smelt Sperm.

Given the variable catches we have learned not to get too excited about any given day of smelting. We have learned this lesson the hard way over the years. We stockpile no ice, prepare no boxes and we promise nothing to customers. This means that when the catch is strong, we are unprepared. Last Thursday night Randy had the largest catch of his career, 1487# of glorious, flopping, orange-bellied, egg-spewing fish, with at least twice that volume turned loose. We pulled the Jackrabbit, a funky, mostly stripped Astrovan, out of pre-scrap yard retirement, grabbed a 5-gallon bucket for a seat, loaded it to the shocks with ice and smelt and headed off to cold storage. During the course of the day, the Jackrabbit developed a small but persistent electrical fire in the console, the side door fell off and the front-to-back prisoner barrier gave way, landing 200-300# of smelt in the front passenger seat. But the smelt made it just fine. Randy O'Bryant and the persistent, delicious Surf Smelt, JFF Salutes You!! Remember, we always have frozen smelt and once in a while, fresh. Special thanks to Gary Lawrence for the use of this beautiful photo.

Scallop HiatusAs any sharp-eyed Fish-O-Gram reader knows, our new pink scallop fishery is a year-round endeavor. However, they are extremely susceptible to red tide, or PSP (paralytic shellfish poisoning). Last week PSP levels began to climb in Whatcom County, and plankton monitoring in Eastsound came up with some volume of Alexandrium cells, the plankton that causes red tide. We have been steadily testing our waters and found some increased PSP in blue mussels, but not yet in the scallops. Monday's samples from our waters showed PSP levels in the mussels dropping. However, Whatcom county continues to light up, with the latest samples from Birch Bay and Semiahmoo heading up to danger levels. Given the speed with which scallops take up the toxin, we have decided to suspend shipments until the PSP situation stabilizes. Look for further updates! Scallop absence can only make the heart grow fonder. Also, another excellent and timely scallop article came out recently in Thrillist. https://www.thrillist.com/eat/ seattle/singing-scallops-seatt le-seafood. Thank you, Naomi!

Until the dinoflagellate bloom subsides, forget me not....

June 22!! Mark The Date!! Baker River Sockeye!!
River Bound.Next Thursday, the 22nd our favorite Sockeye fishery kicks off!
Baker River sockeye are one of only a handful of early sockeye runs in Washington State. They are a spectacular fish in every way-- they spend more time in fresh water than any other Sockeye run, meaning their fat reserves are unmatched. Baker Sockeye have the highest Omega Three reserves of any salmon. Baker River Sockeye have a deep and rich flavor,, but they also have a subtle, almost perfumed delicacy to them. They are phenomenal in any salmon preparation, but they truly shine in raw, smoked, cured and pickled preparations. Baker River Sockeye are also a testament to a tremendous fisheries success story.

The Baker River is a tributary of the mighty Skagit River. The Baker River fish almost went extinct following construction of a power dam in 1925--reaching a low of 92 returning fish in 1985. Since that time local tribes and Puget Sound Energy have rebuilt the run to the point where it is now fully self-sustaining and can support robust sport and tribal fisheries. This year more than 50,000 fish are expected to return. Our tribal partners harvest the sockeye in limited numbers in the Skagit River. Help us celebrate this culinary and conservation treasure! Fish will be available in limited quantities starting on the 23nd and stretching for probably four weeks. Clear Your Menus!!! The Queen of Sockeye is Almost Here!!!!

We also have a handful of flash frozen, Vaccum Packed, Pin Bone Out Baker River sockeye filets from last years' fishery. We expect to be sold out shortly,
Average filet size is 1.75-2.25# and they are packed in 50# cases. This is spectacular fish for an extremely reasonable price.

Bubble Trouble

A combination of nasty weather, a persistently cold mass of water off the coast, funky politics and the usual chaos-theory nature of fisheries have piled up our typical spring fisheries. Halibut was the victim of nasty inter-tribal brinksmanship and, very sad to say our inside tribes were not been able to capitalize on what should have been a banner year for halibut. Fishing is generally better early in the spring for inside halibut. The last opener very few boats bothered to fish and managers scheduled the fishery to take place during a typhoon. Spot prawns have been equally off--low temperatures have kept catches down as the prawns are less apt to travel to bait. So those fisheries have been slow, pricing has been ridiculously high and volume disappointing. The summer cycle of Puget Sound crab openings has been delayed by soft crab, as the Dungeness grow and mature more slowly than usual. Coastal crab has been the only game in town and pricing has been insane. China has gone dark on crab purchasing--another regulatory, import barrier kind of game. So what crab has been coming in has been from the Oregon and Washington Coasts, has been weak and has been selling entirely into the domestic market, with lots of claims for deadloss. Between slow crabbing, the balky Chinese market, and the other fisheries not performing to expectations, the bevy of China-Oriented crab buyers now operating in the state have been going through the slowest time many of them have ever known. Most of these outfits are fairly new, Chinese-owned and have never ridden out a down-cycle in crab production or markets. The next few years could be interesting, we saw something similar a few years back when geoduck markets began to wobble. For a good spell live tanks, seawater chillers and geoduck crates were all over Craigslist. In any case, our crab broker friends have been seeming strained of late......

With export markets off the table, domestic crab markets have become a bloodbath as the players vie for market share and activity. Last week saw a flurry of crab openers in the lower end of Puget Sound, with far too many buyers chasing too few boats, who in turn were chasing too few crab. Prices were high, but fishing slow enough that most of the fishermen pulled pots long before the opening ended. However, the crab were large and beautiful.

Cold, Lethargic and Frustrating.

Crab Price to Plummet!
Monday the first real pop opener of the season gets underway with Port Susan and Skagit Bay opening for 36 hours. This should be some real volume--the model forecasts 350,000# to be caught in 36 hours. So this will be the first volume test of domestic markets since April. At the same time Canadian crabbers are starting to catch some real volume and this product is now driving pricing. The smart money is calling for boat pricing to settle in the $3 range, down from $7.00# last week. At these prices, Monday's opener will represent over a million dollars pumped into the local fisheries economy. As ever, however, anything could happen. Stay tuned!! These crab will be large, angry, hard-shelled and bursting with meat. Test fishing came up with 20+ crab per pot on a two hour soak. Next opener will likely be in Boundary Bay when test catches show the crab to be hard enough. From here on out we should have an endless supply of strong, local reasonably priced crab.

Tip of the iceberg.

Watery Delights Ahead!!

Alaska Salmon fisheries kick off for reals this coming week with Bristol Bay, Southeastern and Kodiak kicking in. Alaska salmon looks strong but not spectacular this year. We, and every other distributor this side of Duluth will have fresh Salmon For All. Halibut continues strong, with the most consistently reasonable pricing we have seen in years. Black Cod is readily available, but expensive. Looking ahead, Cucumbers open on August 1, Alaska Weathervane Scallops open in July 1. Washington, Oregon and California troll salmon seasons burn on, with decent catches and high prices. Pink scallops shall return and our own oyster production, namely Euro Flats and Olympias, is shortly to hit the highest levels in many years. In the spirit of thinking ahead for preparation's sake, urchin will fire up again in late September. Urchin demand is up and California production continues to struggle to recover from El Nino, while Southeastern Alaska divers report carnage in the urchin stocks as Sea Otter populations boom. Puget Sound urchin is currently the strongest resource on the coast and we expect competition for the resource to be very high this fall. This will mean higher pricing and shorter seasons.

Ursa Minor, Worth a Meal, Worth a Trip, Worth a Large Tip.

Over the past years as we have honed our ministry, creative partnerships with chefs have been our greatest motivation, solace and inspiration. Relationships with chefs, local, regional and beyond have been the driving force of JFF. We stumbled onto Nick Coffey some years back at Barjot and were instantly smitten with him personally and with his food. Nick's playful, minimalist, ingredients-driven cuisine puts him in the very top tier of the chefs we have been privileged to work with over the years. We followed him to Ciudad and were overjoyed when Nick and (now) wife Nova decided to settle on Lopez and take over the former Haven space following Haven's upgrade to the former Bay Cafe building.

The House that Nick and Nova Built.

Nick proposed to bring something new to the San Juans dining scene--his signature, stylized Northwest minimalism with an uncompromising focus on Lopez-Sourced ingredients. No fish and chips, no New York Strip with polenta and no Cysco truck. This was an audacious move--every chef in the county, no matter how skilled and ambitious, makes a point of anchoring menus in the familiar and well loved--flights of fancy are generally restricted to specials and wine dinners. Nick and Nova's gamble was that exclusively focusing on his signature style would draw locals as well as visitors.

Not sure what it is, but we liked it.

Two months in, we are pleased to report that as a culinary exercise, Ursa Minor is a spectacular success. The decor is unexpectedly simple, understated, elegant, soothing and comfortable, lending a space that has always been a little awkward the cleanly feel of a rural Mexican Church set for dinner, with hand-made pottery and zen-garden quality flower arrangements. Service, led by Nova, is competent, relaxed and just warm enough. The menu is limited, ingredients-driven, and is of a quality, creativity and originality to rank entirely it in it's own class. All dishes are ephemeral, but every menu includes superlative preparations including an asparagus dish with morels and egg yolk, a braised brassica dish that, by flavor and smell evokes, in almost eerie detail, springtime tidelands, and rolling pork preparations that anchor the more far flung vegetable offerings. Ursa's menu is characterized by consistent, extraordinary hits and no misses.

Ursa's winelist is equally of a piece with the build-out and food. Exquisitely chosen and paired, the beverage list is just right. Our only complaint is that the list of non-alcoholic options needs a little fleshing out for the benefit of the little people. In all things Nick and Nova have turned the potential liabilities of a small, startup restaurant and of Lopez Island, into great assets. The food is Nick's alone, and not comparable to anything else, but in depth, execution and passion, Ursa Minor reminds us of early days at now-iconic restaurants like the Walrus, Art of the Table, Blaine Wetzel's arrival at The Willows or Sitka and Spruce. However, the setting, both in terms of the building and the quiet, Island location, create an ambiance that is completely unique. Ursa Minor is to the run of Farm-to-Table restaurants as Professor Longhair is to New Orleans music--wholly of a genre, but also, emphatically, it's own thing, and just like Professor Longhair, to go in expecting "When the Saints Go Marching In", or in this case, seared U-10 scallops and grilled king salmon with remoulade is to guarantee a shock. Nonetheless, here is fair odds that Ursa Minor will come to define and inform a generation of San Juans cuisine in the same way that Professor Longhair now defines and informs--to the point of haunting, New Orleans musicians.
Now is the chance to experience his food and the realization of his and Nova's vision in the early days of what is clearly a raging love-affair with the Lopez Island landscape and foodshed. It is also a chance to experience a budding, world-class culinary talent at current, more than reasonable pricing.

Something Tasty buried under the forest floor...

Ursa Minor alone is worth a trip to Lopez from any departure point. The Island offers many lodging options, from waterfront VRBO palaces at $650/nt, to the Edenwild Inn ($100-250ish/nt), a cross street away from Ursa Minor, to a sleeping bag in the hay mow at Jones Ranch (a six-pack per night).

Until Next Time, we are your Smelt Packing, Scallop Testing, Sockeye Lusting, Crab Price Busting, Ursa Minor Dining, Six Pack Hustling, JFF Crew........

office@jffarms.com

360.468.0533

Fish-O-Gram #23- The Halibut Edition!!! San Juans Fishery--Interrupted--NEW OPENER (TENTATIVELY) SET!!! Greenland Halibut Sweeps the East, Pink Scallops Hit LV!!! Creatures From the Sea!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 18:43:00 +0000

The 2017 halibut fishery has now been open for 16 days. Alaskan production is over 1100,000# so far with more brewing. Canadian production is unknown, but we have seen some substantial volumes of fish coming south. We are not too proud to sell Alaskan or Canadian halibut, but our special joy is the local halibut. More tender, flavorful and rich than the Alaskan variant, only 150,000-some odd# are harvested a year during two-five tribal-only openers. Our local tribesmen have figured out how to run longline gear with crab blocks, and so for a few golden days each spring the Inside tribal crab fleet turns into a long-line mosquito fleet. Last Monday the 20th we got a brief crack at the halibut. Opening day of halibut is like Christmas, Easter, every birthday and Thanksgiving all rolled up in one, only better. Monday was good, but then it got very weird. For years we have trumpeted halibut openers, subject, we said, to last-minute changes and postponement caused by tribal deaths, to weather, and to inter-tribal political melt-down. We forgot to add Federal Judges to our list of potential threats.

Seen on the Road

Like most things fish-related, local halibut has a mighty back story. We sell, eat and recommend Inside fish, but on the coast the Quinault, Quileute and Makah tribes engage in a much larger volume halibut fishery at the same times as the Inside tribes. The Outside fish are smaller, more abundant and lack many of the toothsome traits of their Inside relations. The difference is most likely due to diet and water conditions--the San Juans have such tremendous water flow that every marine species caught here is the acme of it's type--this holds for finfish, shellfish and crustaceans.

Fish Is War.

Quota for everyone, Alaskan, Canadian, Tribal and sport, is set by the International Pacific Halibut Commission. The tribes may only harvest halibut to the quota set by IPHC scientists. They may schedule the fishery to their own liking. However, they must all agree amongst themselves. This is a tall task, given the sums of money at play, the importance the tribes place on their fisheries, and the power-plays of honky fish managers and lawyers, plus the huge disparities in wealth between the central-I-5 "Casino tribes", and the Western and Northern, more fish-dependent tribes and again the disparities based on access to various fisheries resources, including hugely lucrative geoduck fishery. "All Diplomacy,." in the words of Zhou Enlai the first Premier of Red China, "Is Continuation of War by Other Means". And this nugget is a play on the Von Clauswitz quote, "War is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means" In Washington State, "Fish is the Continuation of War by Other Means", whether we are talking Tribal, State-Licensed or Sport fishers, not to mention environmental groups, farmers and loggers, and certainly state and federal bureaucracies.

Everyone Fights Over Fish.

U&A Means Opportunity.
After the 1974 Boldt Decision, which codified the tribes' right to 50% of fish resources in Washington State, each tribe was required to set and verify their rights to fish in given areas, based on evidence of historic usage. These zones are known as "Usual and Accustomed Areas" (U&A) parroting language in the treaty. So the S'Klallam tribes, for instance, may fish out to Neah Bay but no further, throughout the San Juans, but not farther north than the northern tip of Orcas Island. They may also fish in Hood Canal, but are barred from the lower Puget Sound South of a line drawn between Edmonds and Kingston, and East of the opening to Possession Sound. The tribes are constantly contesting one another's U&As, with the most dramatic change of recent years being a federal court barring the Lummi Nation from fishing the Straits south of a line drawn one mile south of Lopez and San Juan Islands and run East to Biz Point on Fidalgo Island. The rationale for this was a finding that judge Boldt erred in granting Lummi this area with little concrete evidence of historic usage. The real driver here, though was that the Lummi Navy, the largest, best equipped and professional fishing fleet on the Inside was dominating the fishery to the point that other tribes were more or less shut out. The Lummis still, however, maintain rights to fish in Area 9, which runs South of a line from Point Wilson at Port Townsend to Partridge Point on Whidbey and North of a line between Edmonds and Kingston and West of a line from the Southern tip of Whidbey to the Snohomish county shoreline. As the Lummis sourly point out, how does the Judge think the Lummi ancestors made it to area 9 without passing through the now-forbidden Southern Straits district? Area 9 is rich in crab, geoduck, urchins and cukes, and is the constriction point for all the South-Sound Puget Sound salmon, but because the Lummi have access to area 9, the Southern tribes and WDFW refuse to allow an area 9 salmon fishery. And every year the Lummis threaten to unilaterally open for coho and chum salmon in area 9.....War by other means.....

It only gets more complex from here.

Halibut Hi-Jinx--Cry Havoc!!!

Typically the Washington tribes open their fishery on the first day of the season, this year being the 11th of March. This guarantees the highest pricing of the year, as our local halibut hit the market crucial hours before the first Alaskan or Canadian fish can. So Salish Sea Halibut is not only the best of the year, it is typically the first of the year. This first fishery is an unrestricted derby fishery, meaning that fishers may land as much fish as they like. Subsequent openers occur around other fisheries and are typically limited to 300-500# per boat. Outside tribes like to stretch out the limited fishery so as to be able to retain halibut in their targeted black cod fishery.

This year saw a string of bad weather forecast for the early days of the halibut opener. Inside tribes would have chosen to fish anyway and take their chances with the weather to take advantage of the high prices. Outside tribes were more conservative, and the fishery was delayed from March 11. That entire week actual weather conditions dramatically under-performed forecasts. The Makah were willing to take a flyer on the weather, but the Qulieute refused to budge and the Quinault backed them up. The Inside tribes, watching time, good tide series and markets slipping away, decided to buck Quileute and go fishing. An opener was called for Monday the 20th from 7:00am 'till midnight Tuesday. Roughly 150 boats from Lummi, Nooksack, Swinomish, Tulalip, Suquamish, and the S'Klallam tribes, Port Gamble, Jamestown and Elwha hit the water. Each boat spends at least $1000 in bait with fuel, gear and other expenses adding up higher yet. Crab is always slow through the deep-winter months and the halibut fishery marks the first big financial bump of the spring season. Our last Monday was spent burning up the phone lines as we lined up fish logistics, moved last-minute bait around and fielded pricing chatter. Catches were strong on the first few picks. Meanwhile, Quileute went to court. At roughly 2:30pm Federal Judge Ricardo Martinez ordered the fishery closed by injunction, with all hooks required to be out of the water by 6:00pm Monday. Judge Martinez further ordered the tribes to come up with a revised plan to present to him April 15. In the interim the halibut, and all related fisheries are to remain closed. This includes black cod, the biggest money of any coastal fishery.

Predictably, the inter-tribal back and forth has gotten very heated. Many of our sources in the tribal-politics world are scratching their heads over this one: Quileute has the smallest and least-productive fleet of the coastal tribes. By some counts they field no more than eight boats for the halibut fishery. They are also the most remote and likely the poorest of all the Western WA tribes. In this instance, Quileute has decided to play the spoiler. Maybe it is simply the weather, or maybe, behind closed doors, the Quileute are pushing some other issue, far from prying F.O.G. eyes and ears, by means of stalling fisheries worth tens of millions of dollars. War by other means............

BREAKING NEWS!! In a subsequent ruling, in consideration of all tribes coming to agreement, Judge Martinez has allowed fisheries to proceed effective 7:00am Weds the 29th. As of now the tribes are planning a Thurs/Friday opening. We're going fishing again!!!!!!!!!

Nobody, I mean NOBODY goes fishing 'till I say so

Salish Sea Halibut, JFF and You.

Despite the train-wreck-like nature of the opener, we managed to secure 11000# of beautiful, large, inside halibut. The bulk of these fish are lovingly rat-holed, in beds of crushed ice, at at a secure location in South Seattle. We are carefully metering out these precious fish to make them last as long as possible. Remember, halibut is one of the few fish that actually improve with age--at least up to a certain point. Back in the halibut schooner days of 6-week return trips from Seattle to the Gulf of Alaska or Bering Sea grounds, the old-time crewmen made a point of pulling fish from the bottom of the hold for their homepack. So treated with age, cold and weight pressure, halibut turns mildly yellow, the texture firms up and the flavor rounds out, something like a fine aged gouda. We have experimented with this, and have found aged halibut to be one of the finest seafoods we have ever eaten. We don't push it this far for sale to you, but the point is: don't be afraid to purchase and sell well-handled halibut that is up to three weeks out of the water. We will have Salish Sea Halibut throughout the next few weeks. We will always be the first and last in the market with local fish. Even with the best of intentions, though, it is just a few fleeting weeks of the best halibut in the world. Once they are done and gone, this, we will return, with a sigh, to Alaskan or Canadian product until next year, weather permitting, and judge allowing.

Halibut Market Report.

Halibut used to be a cheap fish. Back in the day it was the choice of fish-and-chip restaurants and a favorite retail fish. In the past years, however, pricing has climbed to be one of the most expensive fish around and is strictly in the realm of fine dining. This year retail halibut started at over $30#. Halibut pricing has always baffled us, why, out of all the firm white fishes available, has halibut scaled the greasy pole to become a premium animal? A major part of it is likely the transition in Alaska from a derby fish to an IFQ, or Individual Fishing Quota, fish. This means that fishers own a small fraction of the resource, and can harvest their quota at any time within the IPHC mandated time window. This has allowed the bulk of halibut to go out to the world fresh, rather than the frozen-market focus of a volume derby fishery years. What Alaskan halibut does get frozen is generally from from the more remote reaches of the state and is a truly premium product, destined for high-end domestic, largely Eastern US markets. Across the pond in Russia, a substantial halibut fishery burns on with a frozen-focus. The lower end and food-service segments of our market are big users of Russian halibut. Also, the fishery has been steadily ratcheting down over the past 10 years as the Alaskan resource has cycled downward, constricting supply. Size and presentation surely has something to do with it as well--halibut are big and beautiful and fun to cut and play with--Pacific cod, a better tasting fish, in our opinion, are small, bony and a nightmare to process--we always end up badly slashed every time we try to work with whole p-cod. Halibut are an almost entirely domestic fish--there is practically no export market for them, and our friends in China get almost no Pacific halibut. So halibut are an America-First kind of fish, beloved across the land. with little appeal for foreigners. Now the resource and fishery are on their way back up in terms of volume. Where to for pricing?

Flatfish Rivals.

The Atlantic Ocean is blessed with two, roughly equivalent fishes. The Atlantic halibut and the Greenland halibut, or Hippoglossus hippoglossus and Reinhardtius Hippoglossoides. Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Russia are the primary harvesters of these fish. Greenland Halibut are harvested in huge numbers, the most recent figures we could find, for 2010, put the catch at a quarter of a billion pounds a year, five times the entire harvest of Pacific halibut, with harvest numbers certainly higher now. Atlantic halibut tally up closure to Pacific halibut numbers, but along with Greenland and Pacific hali, all these species are on the increase. Pricing for Greenland halibut is dramatically lower than for Pacific. The only published figures we could find were for frozen Greenland fish delivered into Japan for less than $4.00#. Greenland halibut has been a major import species for both China and Japan in recent years. This past winter, with increased abundance, harvests, aggressive pricing and the ongoing slow-down in Chinese and Japanese seafood imports, Greenland halibut has made major inroads in the American market. Major Alaskan processors report large volumes of frozen halibut still on hand, as expected sales to the East Coast did not materialize. As our fresh season has kicked off here, we are seeing a sluggish pipeline for halibut sales into these markets. Reports have it that the major fish processors are shipping fresh halibut into the Eastern states at well below cost to try and claw back some of the Eastern market share from the Greenland product. So fresh Pacific halibut offers are actually lower right now in New York than in Seattle. This situation will not endure, Pacific halibut must drop in price to compete with the Greenland. Processors are going to be skittish about freezing fish and adding to their inventories. So we expect mildly lower halibut pricing this year. Nothing dramatic, but with the ongoing ramp-up in seafood pricing, halibut will stand out as a relative value fish. We do, however, expect the usual price bump midsummer when the bulk of the Alaska fleet is chasing salmon.

Those Greenlanders Out-Fish and Under-Price us.

Scallop Photo of the Week!

Scallops continue to roll and continue to win new hearts and markets. Going forward every weeks' Fish-O-Gram will include the loveliest scallop photo forwarded to us that week. Keep 'em coming!

Pink Scallop Photo of the Week. Chef David Perez, Estatiorio Milos LV. Chef David, You have won an all-inclusive tour of the JFF shellfish hatchery or a 5# bag Lopez Island smelt, Your Choice!

Visitors from the Deep!

As we settle into a routine with scallops, one of the unexpected bonuses is the fine variety of deep-water fauna that ends up in the dive bags along with a healthy assortment of rocks and barnacles. Below are some of the highlights.

This is a Puget Sound King Crab, one of the most beautiful forms of life we have ever seen.

The Children are NOT dive-caught.

What an animal!

A jingle shell oyster. Edible, but nasty....

Another small crab. We don't know what it is.

Until next time we are your, Halibut-Beheading, Mermaid-Gawking, Court-Order-Following, Ice-Fishing, News-Breaking, Scallop-Fetishizing, Species-Identifying, JFF Crew. Just a call, text or e-mail away.

Fish-O-Gram #22! Saturday Scallop-O-Rama!! Your Scallop Questions Answered!! Inside Crab is Winding Down..Tribal Halibut....3/20/17!!! We Have a Date!!...Maybe...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Mar 2017 20:00:00 +0000

Go to Babirusa. Go to Babirusa.

La Vie En Rose. This past week Scallop sales have soared, with the happy little creatures fanning out to restaurants all over the Puget Sound basin and making inroads into Portland and San Francisco. Our fingers are shredded from packing those spiny shells, the divers are tired, but diners are happy, and we seem to be keeping up. We are deeply grateful to all of you who make the scallop magic happen on the plate. You are our partners in making the scallop dream a reality and proving to the State that this fishery is a thing of value. We are now delivering scallops to Seattle three Days a week, Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Limited Finfish and some other product also available Saturday. Scallop orders may be e-mailed in up to 6:00am Saturday Mornings. This goes for tomorrow morning. We and Joe Stephens, our dive master will be at F2C2 at Bastyr University in Kenmore this coming Monday shucking scallops at the boozy post-session reception. Come say howdy!

Traffic to our website has exploded. We want to share this moment in the sun with you. We have installed a Pink Scallop tab on our website which leads to names, logos, photos and testimonials from serving restaurants. If you would like to be included, please send on your relevant information and we will be delighted to post it.

Scallop Trivia...You Asked, We Answer.

Pink Scallops are both similar to and different from other bivalves. This makes a difference in the water, in the walk-in and on the stove. Living as they do at depth, and being mobile, pink scallops cannot close their shells all the way, unlike clams, mussels and oysters. In fact, scallops propel themselves by compressing water in their mantle and firing it out the slit openings on either side of the hinge. Therefore, Scallops do not retain water like other shellfish species. For a clam to be dry and gaping in the bag is a problem. For an oyster it is a disaster. For a scallop, it is normal. A gaping scallop is not a dead scallop--if the scallop is dead you will know it, and you will have no desire to eat, cook or serve it. When cooked or cut open, the exuded liquor originated from the scallop tissue, not the water in the shell. This makes for an especially intense flavored broth or raw-eating experience. Scallops should be stored cool, not cold, and dark. Please avoid direct ice contact.

Most scallops are drag harvested and the muscle cut off the shell and away from the rest of the animal. This is partially because muscle-only scallops are and have been the industry norm for centuries, but also because of arcane FDA regulations governing where shellfish may be harvested--FDA allows an exception for muscle-only scallop harvest. In other, less government-heavy nations, like Red China, whole scallops are commonplace in the marketplace. In the good old US the only scallops available whole that we know of are ours and limited volumes of Eastern Bay Scallops.

Our pinks are exclusively dive harvested and can certainly be processed thusly, but that is to lose out on a truly unique taste experience. Pink Scallops layer the sweetness and sea-freshness of a scallop muscle with the depth and umami of a whole clam or oyster, as well as having the high tones of roe--they all have either an egg or milt sack to top it all.

Attention Tag-Hags!!

Sharp-eyed customers have pointed out a few concerns with the shellfish tags requiring further explanation. First the dates. Many of you have asked why the shellfish tags declare the harvest dates as being as much as a month prior to shipment date. This is because the scallop harvest date is determined as being the day the scallops are plucked from the depths. We then bring them to our farm, immerse them in our water and hold them for a minimum of two weeks. This is a Health Department requirement based on the byzantine shellfish handling regulations, and is known as a shellfish relay. Relays are primarily used in placed like New Jersey to allow harvesters to dig clams in proximity to petrochemical plants and sewage outfalls, then transfer them to cleaner water before selling. In this case, it allows us to harvest scallops in some of the cleanest water in the world, then move them to some of the cleanest waters in the world before selling. On the positive side, it also allows us to run a battery of tests on the scallops to ensure their wholesomeness. Once the two weeks pass, we bag and sell as orders come in. The sale date is what goes on your tag as the shipping date. You receive the scallops the same day they are pulled from our water, which is at least two weeks after being plucked from their natal waters. While at our shellfish farm, the scallops eat swim and play, they are stimulated with pattern recognition and simple color games and are as comfortable as we can possibly make them.

We maintain a safe and challenging habitat for our scallops.

Wild VS Farm Scallops

Other alert customers have noticed that the scallops are declared to be "Farmed Product of the USA" on the back of our tags. This is because we are using our general, clam and oyster tags. We are currently working on printing scallop-specific tags that will reflect the complexities of a shellfish product that is wild-harvested, then held at Shoal Bay until shipment. So the scallops are certainly wild-harvested, from the tide swept passages of the San Juans, specifically Rosario Strait. But they could also fairly be called semi-domesticated based on their time in the habitrail and there is some very specific legal language relating to shellfish relays and claims of origin (This relates back to the New Jersey folk not wanting to talk about the sewage outfall). We are currently consulting with WDFW and DOH to make sure we don't cross up any bureaucratic trip-wires.

We like them raw, crudoed, ceviched, steamed, grilled and broiled. We like them in stock, stew, paella, and casseroles. We like them with rice, we like them with bread. We like them with wine, we like them with milk. We like them up, we like them down. We like them in a plane, we like them on a train. We like them at Terra Plata, we like them at L'Oursin we like them at Elliots. We just plain love pink scallops.

Go to the Dahlia. Go to the Dahlia.....

Crab Wind-Down, Price Wind Up.

On the Coast and on the Inside, our crabbers, treaty and non-treaty, are winding down one of the best volume harvests in history, though with lower prices, it has been a solid, but not be a banner year economically. On the inside, between tribal crabbers, state crabbers and sport crabbers total catch may be an all-time record at 14 million pounds. Tribal crabbers pull pots tomorrow in the last wide-open area for the season. They will be occupied with halibut and prawn fisheries for the next few months until the summer-season pop-openers commence in June, though with ongoing small openings and test fisheries for some of the lower-Sound tribes, we will have local crab for the duration. Puget Sound state licensed crabbers remain on the water until the end of the month.

On the Coast all sectors will continue banging away until September 15. The vast majority of the catch has been and gone at this point. On the coast the heavy hitters, or Cream Skimmers--ie, big boats that travel coast-wide chasing different fisheries-- have already moved on to herring, bottomfish or are taking a seasonal rest. The boats that remain in the fishery are the non-migratory variety, plus the tribal fleet. Prices are rising gently but steadily. During times of glut--defined as moments that prices fall below $3.50# to the boat, huge volumes of crab are cooked and frozen, to be sold either as "Whole cooks" or portions, or to be thawed and picked for crab meat. Almost all the picked crab meat on the market is actually frozen and slacked and picked to order. In this way crab processors can maintain a steady flow of picked meat. Now prices have risen, and the market is entirely focused on live crab, both domestic and for export.

This is where some of the better situated and capitalized crab brokers have their moment in the sun: Most crab brokers and small, turn-and-burn outfits. Crab are purchased, sorted, graded and sometimes claw-banded, then sold for a modest mark up-$.25-$.75#, generally. Our favorite Lummi crab buyer's motto is, "Don't let the sun rise on crab" meaning do what it takes to move all your crab, every single night. Profits are modest, but risks are low, and expenses are moderate.

A handful of operators have the ability to hold huge volumes of live crab. Most of these outfits also chill and direct-ship crab, meaning their average mark-up is more like $1-$2# . Puget Sound, with excellent water and access to airports and logistical chains is the national headquarters of this business, with crab coming from as far as California and Alaska to Puget Sound plants. Imagine filling a plant with 250,000# of $4.00 crab and holding them until they turn into $5.00 crab. Then you can fill your plant with $5.00 crab and hold them until they turn into $6.00 crab. And this is on top of the typical mark-up. To hold crab, however, is vastly more labor, and when things go bad they go bad in spectacular style. More than once we have been at the Skagit dump when literal dump-truck loads of dead crab have come in from one of the big-dog crab buyers in Anacortes. Still, when the call comes from Shanghai, or from LA, and you have the goods, and no-one else does......

Worth more each passing day.

When it comes to crab, we venture to boast that our live crab program is the best in the market. We get the pick of the litter from our Anacortes Crab Broker. Once pulled from the water they are at your door within hours, large, perky, angry and well-priced. Island Customers get crab direct from our tanks. Order with Confidence. We've got the goods.

Local Halibut--Hurry Up and Wait, or, All Baited Up and Nowhere to Go.

Greetings. Can you tell us where to find a Federal Judge?

Halibut officially opened on February 11 coastwide, but you wouldn't know it around here. We have begun trickling Alaska fish, and some Canadian product is going to hit this coming week. Northern-waters halibut is all well and good, but we have been a bit peckish around here. San Juans halibut is our glory, the best halibut in the world, one of the high points of our year, and the ongoing delay is getting old. Briefly, the wrangling between Coastal and Inside tribes has reached a fever pitch, almost to the point of a complete melt-down in relations. The Makah, Quileute and Quinalt are insisting on waiting for a fair weather window with low ocean swells, in the face of a continual string of weather fronts. Swells of more than 10ft makes the fishery dangerous and makes getting in and out of harbor very difficult. Based on a series of court decisions, the tribes are obligated to fish all together. Meanwhile, the tide series continue to cycle in and out of favorable conditions for longline fishing, which doesn't mean much on the Coast but is all-important on the Inside. Had the fishery opened as scheduled on the 11th the fishermen would have had excellent tides. By Tuesday the 14th the tides were horrible. Sunday marks the first day with decent tides since then, but if the fishery slips to later next week, the tides will deteriorate again.

Tribal managers have maintained a daily teleconference since the 7th with no resolution. The latest is that the fleet will likely fire off Monday at 7am and fish 'till midnight Tuesday, but we will know more after tomorrow morning's call.

On the Inside, the weather has been consistently much better than forecast, which is driving the fishermen wild. Most folks baited their hooks last week and had to scramble to make room in the freezer for fishing gear. Crabbers have pulled gear early to clear the decks for halibut. With Alaskan and Canadian fish showing up the market is dropping fast--assuming the first opener will land 300,000# or so of halibut, the economic hit to the fleet of missing the early market will likely be in excess of $500,000. That kind of money slipping away, and the kind of frustration that comes from being on pins and needles for 10 consecutive days is beginning to tell. Your Fish-O-Gram corresponding spoke this afternoon with a highly placed Tulalip who reported that the inside tribes are contemplating going it alone, on the premise that, legal or not, the fishery can be done and over by the time anyone gets a judge out of bed. So what happens now is anyone's guess. WE WILL UPDATE YOU THE MINUTE WE KNOW SOMETHING!!! PRAY FOR MODERATE SWELLS AND FAIR TIDES!!!!!

Fletch Friends.

In consideration of our lucky position at the head of the food chain on halibut, to maximize value to the fishermen, and to help jump-start the spring sales push, we are laying plans to offer sweet pricing on halibut fletches from these superlative fish. Look for pricing updates as pricing solidifies. For this first opener, we aim to be the low price leader on local halibut fletch. Call, Text or E-Mail.

So much more to report, but time is short. Until next time, we are your Hard-Sell, Whole-Scalloping, Crab-Tanking, Halibut Howling, Fletch Friending JFF Crew. Just a call, text or E-mail away!!

Fish-O-Gram Encore Presentation! Scallop Promos! Halibut is Here! Saturday Deliveries!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 03:35:00 +0000

Dear Repetitious Customers,

What with one thing and another, we have not had the time to craft an entirely new Fish-O-Gram to herald the onset of the 2017 Halibut and Blackcod fisheries. So we are pulling from the archives, changing dates and making do. In current news, last night King 5 news aired a 3 minute love story to the rebirth of the pink scallop fishery. It was a beautiful story and we are deeply grateful to KPR publicity for making it happen, Eric Wilkinson for spinning a sweet story and the heavy editing by King 5 technical staff to make us look moderately intelligent and legitimate. Here is the link:

http://www.king5.com/news/loca l/rare-northwest-delicacy-maki ng-a-comeback-in-puget-sound/ 420958458

Traffic to our website has exploded these past hours. We are building a website around linking curious internet surfers to retail outlets and restaurants selling and serving the scallops. If you would like your venue to be featured, please send us logo, links and any photos or additional blurbs you would like shared.

Will success go to their heads?

Encore presentation.....Our 2016 Halibut-Centric Fish-O-Gram with a few key dates changed

Dear Halibut-Hungry Customers,

Your long, winter nightmare is almost over! No more trimming freezer-burnt Pacific Ocean Perch filets for fish-fry, no more slogging through mountains of hormone-laced factory farm pork! No more trying to torture basketball sized beets and celery root into something resembling an entree! The Fish Train is Here!!! Saturday, Halibut as well as IFQ Alaska Black Cod. April 1, Washington Coast Black Cod. April 15, fresh Oregon Troll Kings!! Away we go!!!!.

We are now in the final countdown to the March 11 Halibut Opener. Every fishery, including Alaska, Canada and West Coast open simultaneously. Here at Jones Ranch, all eyes are on the Tribal-only, inside waters Halibut. This is one of our favorite openings. The weather looks to be reasonable for the weekend and all systems are go. Every fishery is managed differently. In Canada and Alaska, individual fishermen may decide when to fish between the opening and closing dates. On the Washington Coast, most commercial halibutis caught during 8-10 hr targeted openings spread out through the season, and as bycatch in other fisheries. Our tribal cohorts set their own opening schedule within the general opening and their quota, which this year stands at 414,786#, including ceremonial and subsistence fish. Tribal openers are set jointly between all involved treaty tribes, which include the Lummi, Swinomish, Nooksack, Tulalip, Suquamish, Port Gamble S'Klallam, Jamestown S'Klallam, Elwha S'Klallam, Makah, Quillayute, and Quinalt, with each tribe being geographically limited to a historic "usual and accustomed area" The Coastal tribes are seasoned longline fishers, with well-outfitted boasts and access to the most abundant halibut banks, so if good weather prevails on the ocean, these tribes have the capacity to thump most of the quota in a couple of days. In general, the tribes try and schedule halibut early to take advantage of high pricing, and to stay out of the way of the Spot Prawn fishery and the ongoing, episodic spring and summer crab fisheries.

It's big time out on the coast

Tribal Timing.

The first opening is traditionally an unrestricted opener, meaning fishers may land any volume of fish. Subsequent openings may include poundage limits per boat, usually 500#. Setting openings takes on the form of high diplomatic art, with individual tribes trying to tailor the openings schedule to advantage their fleets and screw the other guys. Halibut season is the only time of year the inside tribes set aside their own differences to join fire on the coastal tribes.
This year the inside tribes are praying for weather rough enough to keep some of the outside tribes in port, but calm enough to allow inside fishing, and so keep coastal landings down and hold some quota on the table for future openers. In the event this looks likely, the Makah will either force a postponement of the fishery or demand a poundage restriction to hold inside catches down. Further complicating things, an untimely death, or the death of a highly placed tribal member, of any individual tribe, can postpone the fishery until the funeral and reasonable mourning period is over. Lummi funerals last up to five days. During an extended string of deaths the business of the tribe grinds almost completely to a halt. This could yet happen, but an informal survey of Lummi Elders indicates that everyone is holding strong right now.

Inside halibut are for hugging.

Our Wish is for Inside Fish.

We are inside rats--both by geography and affinity. For years we have worked with the Finkbonners of Lummi to bring the local halibut to market. We maintain our ties to the Finkbonners, and have now branched out to source fish from the Wilbur Family of Swinomish, Mark Hatch and Co of Tulalip and a whole raft of new friends in the S'Klallam tribes. Inside fish benefit from all the glory of our island-studded home. It is the unique combination of huge water-exchange coupled with our protected little bays that give all marine life in the San Juans unparalleled flavor, quality and authority. The primary food supply for our islands halibut is Spot Prawns. Inside halibut also tend to be larger, fattier and just generally better. We have have never once seen a chalky halibut over the quarter-million of so pounds of inside fish we have handled these past years, while the coastal fish are notorious for chalky fish. Plus, who would we be if we did not hold our hometown fish above all others? Some people boost sports teams, we are Islands Halibut Superfans.

We expect 3-4 openers spread out between Saturday and the beginning of May. As discussed in a previous Fish-O-Gram, these halibuthold up exceptionally well. We expect to have a steady supply of local halibut at least through the end of April. Accept no substitutes!!Halibut bycatch is almost as much fun as the fish itself. We get loads of true-cod, ling cod, yellow eye, the occasional blackcod and tens of thousands of pounds of skate and dogfish.

I'll take the one from Lummi, thanks.

Bait for the Boys.

Your faithful Fish-O-Gram correspondent has had a busy last week shuffling bait around the Puget Sound Basin and nailing down the last details of the fishery. For these few brief weeks treaty fishermen convert their crabskiffs over to long-lining. Typically they work the lines through their crab blocks. Catches are modest, so each fish gets individual, loving treatment, usually beginning with a pistol shot to the head to stun the fish, then immediate gutting and icing onboard. There is a true joy in participating in the warp and woof of the seasonal, eternal patterns of the fishery. Halibut numbers are strong and growing, the individual fish are spectacular, the bycatch is terrific, prices are strong but fair, fishers are happy--this is just generally a lot of fun.
We will be buying in Port Angeles, Sequim, Cornet Bay, Lummi, Anacortes and on Lopez. We expect to move 40,000# of 'buts over the course of the fishery. This last week we moved 15000#+ of bait. Favorite baits are Salmon, Octopus, and Argentine Squid, or Illex argentinus.

Scheduling and Pricing.

Fishing commences at 12pm Saturday and extends till 12pm Monday. We will be delivering fish into Seattle Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings, and we will be running a special delivery route Sunday. Tuesday's fish will be stockpiled and sold on for at least a week and a half--well handled halibut improves with age, and we look forward to proving it to you. No pricing has been posted yet, but we expect little change from last year when pricing ranged between $10-13#, H&G. Bycatch, namely cod, ling and skate will be available at market prices. Order now! Also, any and all are also welcome to come participate in the madness! Careering down I-5 with $100,000 worth of fish packed on our farm truck! Staying up all night cutting wings off skate-fish! Creeping around rotten dock-ends at 2-AM with twenty thousand dollars cash and a pistol jammed in the back of your jeans. It is almost, but not quite, as glamorous as being a line cook.

This is where the magic happens!

Cali-Hali Yields to the King of Flatfish.

Many of you have enjoyed the solace of Cali-Hali these last, long, dark months. Snuggling up with this super-sized flounder has been a fine balm for a Northwest winter. With local halibut coming at us like a freight train, the Cali-Hali must now yield to the big dog of Pacific bottomfish. As of this week the Cali Hali season is done, and we are no longer bringing them in.

Safe 'till December.

Chef's Corner.

Previous Fish-O-Grams have discussed the dilemma of skate bycatch in the upcoming halibut fishery. We have always prided ourselves on being able to utilize just about anything from the sea. Also, hard working halibut fishermen rely on bycatch for fuel or bait money. It becomes an important part of their season. Ergo, in order to purchase the superlative local halibut, we find we must also take on thousands and tens of thousands of pounds of skate fish. Both Long-Nosed and Big Skate are plentiful in island waters, and they can be fun, if handled right. They are also huge, stinky, bony and prickly and they ooze ammonia-laden slime in epic volumes. Like all shark-type fishes, they pee through their skin, meaning the slime they ooze is mostly urine. We have long sold small volumes of skate to our restaurants, but in recent years the sheer volume of skate coming in has been causing us real troubles. Last year the Finkbonners alone came up with 20,000# plus of skate fish. We were pleased then, when out of the blue, we received a call from from folk who offered to buy any and all skate we could come up with for export to Korea. We have always known that Koreans love skate, but never why, or how it is prepared.

Waterfront peoples world-wide have eaten skate fresh for millennia. But Skate Culture, and skate preservation, originated in the Southern Korean Province of Jeolla and specifically on Heuksando island in the 14th century. Local lore claims that islanders developed fermented skate, or Hongeo, during a period when Japanese pirates scoured the Korean coastline-- islanders had to repeatedly abandon their homes, run up river for protection and they needed durable foods. Also, Hongeo could legitimately be considered a weapon. Left entirely alone, the ammonia in skate skin ferments the skate flesh. Treated thus, Hongeo lasts indefinitely. As southerners moved to the bright lights of Seoul, they brought their affection for Hongeo with them. The rest is history. Hongeo took Seoul by storm, and is now one of Korea's favorite, featured national dishes. Korea now catches, imports, prepares and consumes literally millions of pounds of Hongeo annually. Skates and rays come from all over, but as with most things marine, Puget Sound produces the best, the slimiest, skate anywhere.

Home of the Hongeo

Hongeo Education.

In a delightfully unexpected turn of events this past week, your FOG correspondent found himself of an evening drinking beer in Kent with a nest of heavily hair-jelled Korean Hipster fish brokers. Loosely scheduled as a forum to discuss skate marketing, the meeting rapidly turned into a plant tour, philosophical conclave, and recipe swap. The plant was full-tilt busy at 8pm marinating Pollack Roe with a bright-red MSG based brine to make beer-drinking snacks. Cases of (Chilean) farmed salmon snuggled sushi papers, rice wine and case upon case of MSG in all of it's glorious forms. Next week this plant will be abuzz creating what may be Korea's greatest gift to fish cookery, Hongeo, or fermented skate. Skate urinate through their skin, meaning that skin-on skate develops a very strong ammonia odor. This ammonia, used wisely, can preserve the whitefish between. Hongeo is eaten when the odor, described as "uncleaned outhouse" and "rotten feces" reaches it's apex. Hongeo ammonia levels can become so high as to cause skin lesions. The texture is described as terrible, chewy and spongy with nuggets of hard cartilage. Aficionados report getting a buzz from eating Hongeo, similar to alcohol, but cleaner and, well, stinkier. It is said to be good for handovers, digestion, low vitality and, of course, is an aphrodisiac, assuming you can grab a shower, a complete change of clothes and swab out your mouth with lye before getting busy.

Skate in this country has traditionally been directed to the lowest-end whitefish uses and faux scallops for the casino buffet crowd. Our hipster chefs love it, but there is no real volume there. Koreans obviously have bigger things in mind for the fish,and we at JFF feel strongly that they should have it. However, knowing that you pride yourselves on being at the forefront of culinary trends, we offer JC's (hipster fish broker) home-cooking Hongeo Recipe.

Take one large Skate. Cut wings off. Wrap in cut grass or hay. Leave at room temperature in a sealed, odor proof room for 1-2 months until the odor and off--gassing, when checked, induces retching and burns the eyes.

Slice thinly, serve with kimchi, sliced radish, lettuce, other condiments or alone, for the uncut experience. Enjoy!

Lurking deep in Kent. Just follow your nose.

This coming Saturday marks the inaugeration of JFF Seattle Saturday deliveries. Please order scallopsFriday for Saturday.

We are, Repetitively, your Halibut Hungry, Scallop Promoting, Skate Fermenting, JFF crew. Call to order! Call to schedule your fish-buying adventure! Call with Fish-O-Gram recipes! Call for spring planting tips! Just Call!

Fish-O-Gram #19

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 02:02:00 +0000

Fish-O-Gram!! Spring is Here, Sorta. Scallop Photojournalism!! Rock Bottom Rockfish!! Hagfish Fun Facts!! Bread Baker SuperStars!! Fare Thee Well, Paisley!!

Dear Peeping Customers,

Despite flying snow, constant wind and biting temperatures, we have been enjoying the music and re-assurance of the peeper frogs down the valley from us these past nights. Our firewood is burnt up, the squash are rotten, the spuds froze out and all our winter greens failed. The first nettles are up, but they are tiny and stunted. So while Jones Ranch is still in the throes of deep winter, the frogs report otherwise. We'll go with the amphibians.

Trust me. Warmer weather ahead.

Pink Scallops--Our Dream For Reals.

Long-time JFF friend and photographer Erik Johnson took to the seas this past to document a scallop harvest. From the most beautiful place in the world, our home, the San Juan Islands, comes the rarest commercial seafood in the world. Pink Scallops capture the aesthetic and Merroir of the San Juans like nothing else. We hope you enjoy these photos as much as we do. Feel free to use them in any promotional form you like. Send us your scallop preparation photos!!

The Pink Scallop Fishery has now been been open and seamless for almost twenty days!! We have been reveling in all the scallops we can eat and working to spread the word. As ever, all credit to our intrepid dive partners. Joe Stephens and his crew deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the scallops. And, as a sharp-eyed reader pointed out last Fish-O-Gram, we need to specially call out Brady Blake of WDFW and his boss, Rich Childers for their role in opening the fishery as well as Bob Sizemore, dive harvest manager. Thank you, Brady!, Thank you Rich! Thank you Bob!

Pink Scallop Hall of Fame.

Harvesting Scallops.

It is a rare privilege to bring such an animal to market. Back in the go-go 80s Pink Scallops were a stalwart of the West Coast Culinary world--there is an amazing amount of pink scallop info on line, as it turns out.

Along the way we came to an interesting conclusion: Pink Scallops are the rarest for of legal seafood in the world. We have long sung the hazards of scallop harvest--rampant bureaucrats, strong currents, anomalous PSP results, fragile product and more. Pink Scallops lurk on the very downward edge of dive-able seafloor anyhow. Harvesting them is highly technical and quite dangerous. Divers use a nitrogen enhanced oxygen blend, but even that considered, work time at depth is as short as 15 minutes. Divers collect them with bare hands or butterfly nets and stuff them into harvest bags.

Pink scallops are biologically amazing.

Pink Scallops have the ability to attach or detach themselves to rocks at will. This allows the scallop to live in very high-flow areas--when the water is calm they detach and zip around like butterflies or water angels. When the tide begins to run hard they snuggle down, bind themselves to rocks and happily filter-feed until the tide slackens. They swim forwards, not backwards as one would assume, with a jet action. Intake water is compressed by their mantle and fired out the slight apertures just up the shell from the hinge. They can swim remarkably fast this way, but are not terribly good at aiming themselves. Pinks have a series of eye spots around the outside of their mantle that, combined, fulfill the function of a complex eye. In molluscan terms, a pink scallop is somewhere between an oyster and an octopus. Most scallops are coated with sea sponge, which protects them from predators and has deeper, little known symbiotic functions. When conditions are right pink scallops can breed in the millions per female. We often get baby pinks settling in our oyster gear, meaning the larvae is so abundant they settle well outside of their optimum growing conditions.

Pink Scallops are delicious.

Pink Scallops have a highly unique flavor profile--as a live, whole animal, in-shell scallop, they combine the sweetness of a sea scallop with the deep umami and slight funkiness of whole, live, shellfish, plus the tang and turn of caviar, as each scallop includes eggs or sperm. Each pink scallop contains the foot or aductor muscle, what in other scallops is harvested and sold for meat, or what is punched out of a skate wing and sold for a scallop, anyhow. Raw, pickled, steamed or grilled they are perhaps the finest seafood of our acquaintance. They are also just flat-out beautiful.

Department of Comparative Seafoods-- Scallop Edition.

Pink Scallops are found from San Diego to Alaska, but only occur in density in the inside waters of the San Juans and Canadian Gulf Islands. Most sea creatures are much more widely dispersed--King Salmon occur from California to the Arctic Circle. Urchins haunt kelp forests world-wide in the temperate band. Even the elusive Olympia Oyster is found, sporadically, coast-wide. So while our area is literally carpeted with pink scallops, this is true nowhere else. Pink Scallops are the quintessential San Juans seafood. Production is small--we are going to be lucky to harvest 100,000# this year. Canada harvests another 60,000#, more or less. This makes Pink Scallops the rarest commercially harvested seafood in the world. Even Beluga Sturgeon caviar is more abundant--global production is upwards of 500,000#/yr. Pink Scallops are expensive. Dive harvest is pricey, our holding system is labor intensive and losses are high. However, at a 15ct/#, they are substantially cheaper than premium oysters and much cheaper than beluga caviar. Scallop meat yield is also much higher than clams or oysters or crab--the shells are thin and light and you are not paying for any retained water. Compared with urchin, king crab, premium meat cuts or spot prawns, scallops are a screaming deal. Back in the day, scallops were served by the bucket at a wide range of restaurants. But just as halibut will likely never again hit $3# and $5/hr kitchen labor is a distant memory, scallop prices have come up to level in the modern world. We think they are worth it.

Once out of the water, they need to be eaten within a few days. This means that, unlike more ship-able forms of sealife, Pink Scallops will never be vaccumed up by our Chinese friends. So Pink Scallops, the ultimate San Juans seafood, find their best application within overnight-shipment range of us and especially in our regional markets. Beautiful, delicious, mysterious, elusive, abundant, sustainable, rare and ephemeral. Pink Scallops are the ultimate taste of the most beautiful corner of the world. THINK PINK!

Helpful Scallops Hints.

Pink Scallops are a deep-water species and unlike clams and oysters have not capacity to seal off their shells out of water. This means they do not retain liquor in their shells, but in the meat, even when pulled directly out of the water. Cooked or shucked, even an open, gaping scallop will have plenty of liquor once prepped. A gaping scallop does not mean a dead scallop. A dead scallop is a stinky scallop. Do not serve or sell stinky scallops. Scallops should be stored in the dark, covered with a moist cloth and protected from direct contact with ice. Too-cold holding conditions will substantially reduce scallop shelf-life.

Once eaten, the shells make fine crafts or ashtrays. Bust out the hot glue gun!

A nice sideline for the Saucier....

Rock Quotas Rise, Prices Fall.

They are coming for you.

Coastwide, green rockfish numbers are strong and rising. The Pacific Fisheries Management Council has responded by increasing the quota for some of the most common rockfish species off the Oregon and Washington coasts. Last year's quota for greenies was 7 million pounds. This years' quota is 25 million pounds. Correspondingly, rock prices are falling. This condition should endure for most of the year, subject, as ever to the vicissitudes of weather, other fishery openings, boat breakdowns, government shutdowns and more.

Science Corner--Department of Expanding Fisheries.

These past years a new fishery targeting Hagfish, or Slime Eels has blossomed on the West Coast. Slime eels exist in huge numbers in deep waters in all western waters. They are the ultimate scavenger/recycler at depths. They use tooth-encrusted tongues to burrow into carcasses and eat them from the inside out. They are long, slimy, and deeply strange. Slime Eels have a superpower, in that when stressed they have the ability to gell vast volumes of water into the consistency of jello. In the wild, this allows a threatened slime eel to escape predators, who are immobilized and potentially killed by the slime--it can plug fish gills to the point that they cannot absorb oxygen.

The Horror....

Starting in the mid-2000s fishermen began targeting the eels for the Korean market. Barrels with holes drilled in them are baited with rotten fish and set in deep water. Fishermen haul them back, hopefully stuffed with eels. In recent times the fishery has been worth close to $2 million/yr just in Washington waters. Eels must be shipped live to Korea, where intrepid chefs prod them to exude slime and thicken soups and sauces. Once eaten, the skins are stretched and preserved for leather production. Slime eel slime is also at the forefront of food-science, military and biomedical research, with all sorts of applications. Holding and shipping eels is an extremely specialized business. Eel tanks must be constantly cycled to keep water fluid enough sos the eels don't suffocate. Apparently eel meat tastes like squid. Eel slime tastes like salt water.

The Slime.....

Staff of Life--Bread Baker Goes Pro.

The trick is not to get between the children and the bread.

Here at Jones Ranch we get a twice-weekly delivery of the best bread we have ever eaten from our good friend and Orcas Islander Heather Immoor. Heather landed on Orcas a few years back after a decade and a half bouncing around the broader culinary world. After a year's stint opening the Catkin Cafe, Heather retreated to her mountain-top redoubt to have a second baby and bake bread. Dubbed "Hedder Bread" by our 4 year old, deliveries are the most anticipated event of the week here--sometimes the loaves don't even make it inside from the van--hungry young Joneses will tear apart a full boule like a wolf pack taking apart a sickly caribou. Heather's bread has a depth, crumb and authority like no other, and her crusts are always beautifully crusted and caramelized. Weeks without Heather bread, such as immediately following the birth of her son, are dark and difficult time. Heather's bread is truly superlative. Now she is making the leap to bake and sell under health department discipline and we are delighted to promote, recommend and deliver "Hedder Bread" to the wider world.

In Heather's own words.....

"What do you do after twenty years of professional cooking? You bake! After bouncing around the country in more restaurant kitchens than I care to count, two kids and island life have led me down a new path: the Path of Sourdough. Water, salt, flour, wild yeast beasties. After years of fascination and experimentation with the complexities arising from the combination of those four things, I'm finally devoting my daily life to the study of them. And the eating of them. Lots and lots of eating of them. We're pleased to bring you Endswell Bakehouse, a microbakery that, come spring, will be turning out a range of sourdoughs and other goodies to fill Island bellies. Retail customers can look for us at the Orcas Island Farmers Market, and restaurants and others interested in wholesale inquiries can find us at heather.immoor@gmail.com (until our website emerges from the dust of construction). Endswell Bakehouse: All's Well."

God Speed, Paisley Madison!!

After a year and a half of representing JFF in Seattle, Paisley is moving on to other endeavors. We have appreciated her persistence, dedication, cell phone skills and flare. Thank you, Paisley! you will be missed!

Place Your Orders Here.

For the time being Ma and Pa Jones will be fulfilling sales duties. In the weeks to come we will be making personal contact with each of you. Do not hesitate to reach out to us. Sara may be reached at 360-468-0533 or orders@jffarms.com. Nick may be reached, when off-island, at 360-298-5407 or ns@jffarms.com.

AND TEXTING IS POSSIBLE FROM OUR REMOTE LOPEZ LOCATION, LET US KNOW IF YOU PREFER TO SEND ORDERS VIA TEXT AND WE CAN SET YOU UP WITH OUR 'EMAIL-TO-TEXT' OPTION.

Until next time, we are your Scallop Cake-Walking, Rock Fish Low-Balling, Slime Exuding, Bread Eating, Post-Paisley JFF Crew. Just a call or e-mail away!!

Fish-O-Gram! Pink Scallop Breakthrough!!!! Chinese New Year--Rooster Time!! 2017, Year of the Halibut!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 23:13:00 +0000

Fish-O-Gram! Pink Scallop Breakthrough!!!! Chinese New Year--Rooster Time!! 2017, Year of the Halibut!!!

Dear Snow-Bound, but Still Pinkly Amorous Customers,

Pink Apotheosis!!!!!!

After seven years of struggle, Thousands of hours of our time, time of dive master Joe Stephens, intercession from State reps Doug Erickson, Kristine Lytton, Brady Blake and many more, our Pink Scallop fishery is a go. Yes, we have announced with before. You'll remember a year ago we officially got the fishery off the ground, but last year's opening was flawed and challenged) We are overwhelmed, overjoyed........ Thanks to everyone who participated. Chefs, partners, divers, politicians, etc.....

Party like it's The Year of the Rooster

This time they gave us an area with scallops in it. Spindle Rock. The Peapods, Pt Carter. Names dear to our hearts. The restricted designation is actually positive--it means we can harvest and hold the product in our Shoal Bay water for two weeks prior to sale.

This would make a nice placemat

Pinks Forever!!!
Pink scallops were once and pink scallops will again, become one of the quintessential seafoods of our region. Attractive, delicious, rare and spunky, Pinks are maybe the ultimate San Juans seafood product. WA State estimates place the population in the tens of millions of pounds. Pinks are found in limited numbers from Southern California to the Gulf of Alaska, but they exist in harvest-able numbers only in the constricted waterways of the San Juans and Canadian Gulf Islands. Scallops need high water-flows to live in any real numbers. They also only congregate on south-facing rocks and ledges, clinging to rock and each other at times of high tidal flows then detaching to flit around at slack water. They have a unique backwards swimming pattern, wherein they can actually create a jet-like action with the flexible mantle and fire compressed water out the back of their shells. Our tribal dive friends call them "Angel Scallops", others dub them Butterfly Scallops, but Singing Scallops is the name that has stuck. We like Pink because it rhymes with Think. Think Pink. Get it?

Pinks are short lived and fast growing, making them a perfect commercial species. Populations seems to follow a boom-and-bust pattern, as broadcast spawners they are able to reproduce in huge numbers when conditions are ripe. Harvesting, handling and distributing them is very challenging; best abundances are found at depths of 90+ feet in high-flow areas, making for brief, technically difficult dives. Scallops pick up PSP, or red tide, in anomalous patterns--the state DOH has excellent data on red tide in clams and oysters going back to the second world war. It has been decades since any commercially harvested shellfish had any PSP related illnesses. Scallops feed on dormant, or cystic, phytoplankton, so they are liable to pick up toxin any time, any place, and each batch must be tested before sale. Singers also have a very brief shelf-life, so losing a day and a half to testing is a big problem for distributing and serving them. Like all commercial shellfish in Washington they must be held in certified water, of which there is precious little in the San Juans. Every days' harvest is returned to our shellfish farm and held in live-tanks until our PSP tests come back clean. Our scallops' freshness clock doesn't start ticking until we pull them on our end. Scallops received in Seattle on a given day have been out of the water 5-6 hours.

Years back a robust fishery targeted the scallops and Seattle restaurants from the Dahlia Lounge to Le Gourmand featured them and select fishmongers offered them to a hungry public. The fishery tapered off in the late 90's, beginning with the retirement of Jim Ranson, the pioneer scallop diver, low seafood prices and ever-mounting regulations. On a tip from food writer Sara Dickerman, we commenced, seven long years ago to bring singing scallops back to market. Unbeknownst to us, just a few miles across the water in Ferndale, Joe Stephens was making the same efforts. Two years ago we joined forces with Joe. He is now our dive-master and full partner in this venture. Last year we had a short-lived fishery, but between inflexible regulations, flaky divers, boat troubles, PSP and having been given an area with no scallops, we didn't get very far. Now, 9, long, bureaucracy-alligator-wrestling months later, we are back in the PINK! This year our Divers report that populations are at or near their peak in living memory.

Enjoy Yourselves, While We're Still in the Pink.
We are still subject to limitations of flaky divers, boat problems and PSP. Singing Scallops are one of the most challenging foods on the planet to bring to plate, harvesting and handling scallops make truffle hunting look like potato digging, goose-barnacle collecting look like picking strawberries and handling and shipping wild mushrooms look like shipping bales of cotton. This fishery is and will remain a tiny volume, sporadic, ultra-specialty product. For the moment we are the only operator in the business. It is our great pride and delight to bring them to our family of friends and customers. We aim to direct these scallops to markets that will showcase them as the Northwest treasure they are. Look for a string of Pink-Themed restaurant events to come. Call Paisley to schedule your own!! Bringing Pinks back is the result of dozens of people working for seven years to bring this to pass, including many of our customers and we thank everyone. We expect good abundance through Mid-May, after which we trend into PSP season, but again, what with flaky divers, boat problems and dormant PSP-bearing dynoflagulates, we never know.

Sunday Dinner at Jones Ranch.

Winter Update From JFF.

Snow Day on Lopez

This winter past has been a tale of limited fishes, heavy weather and immature shellfish--not the stuff of inspired prose. Here at Jones Ranch we have embarked on a pork-intensive diet until the fishes return, entertained ourselves by cutting firewood, playing scrabble, reading vintage science fiction, tormenting the cats and scheming on a fun & fantastic new year.

JFF sells Firewood too.

Sinology Corner.
Chinese New Year is upon us as well. January 27th marked New Years' eve. Festivities begin a week before that and conclude on the 11th of February. This New Year is the year of the Rooster, a year of braggadocio, opportunity and abundant fertility. Joint ventures are at premium, as is strategy over force. In the words of the immortal Sun Tsu. the theme of the year is, “achieve psychological advantage over the adversary and use force only as a last resort." We here at Jones Ranch have sworn off further reproduction for this generation and our cats are fixed, so we will let the livestock and sea creatures multiply while we focus on joint ventures and psyching out the opposition.

We make an ongoing study of the Chinese market and it's ongoing and unpredictable impacts of seafood pricing. Eating fish on or around the New Year signifies increasing wealth in the year ahead, subject to the following rules according to the website, China Highlights;

The head should be placed toward distinguished guests or elders, representing respect.
Diners can enjoy the fish only after the one who faces the fish head eats first.
The fish shouldn't be moved. The two people who face the head and tail of fish should drink together, as this is considered to have a lucky meaning

This year has been another strange one in market terms--geoducks up, crab down. Duck folk are enjoying the highest pricing in four years so expect a flurry of money spent in the tattoo parlors and flesh-pots of Shelton and Brinnon. Painted Ladies of Mason County; Saddle Up!, Happy Times is Here Again!. Farmed ducks have hit @$28# on the water, up $10# in the last four months. Consider what this means for the larger players in the business; a handful of companies are harvesting a million+#/yr of ducks. Recent events are putting an extra $10 million dollars and more into those already distended pockets. We mention no names, but you can fill in the blanks.

Crab pricing, by contrast, has remained strangely soft and strangely flat throughout. Coastal catches have been very strong, with 20+ million pounds caught between state and tribal fleets. Puget Sound is still tracking for an all-time record catch of 12 million+ pounds for the season. California and Oregon and rolling strong, with a combined 20+ million between the two, to date. Still, 50 million pounds, or 25 million individual crab are but a drop in the food flow for 1.3 billion consumers. To the degree that we any of us here on the West Coast enjoy our local seafoods, it is at the sufferance of the Chinese market. The Chinese market has grown from next to nothing prior to 2009 to being the primary driver in Dungeness pricing. We Coasters are outnumbered, out moneyed and out maneuvered for crab, prawns, shellfish, cukes and more. They send us tilapia and processed calamari and we send them the good stuff. But, on the positive side, these past 10 years the Chinese nation has transferred billions of dollars to our coastal communities and tribes. This is glory of a globalized market, product flows to those willing and able to pay. And if Americans are happy to ship our best product overseas and eat Thai Tiger Prawns and Turkish Branzini, well, more power to us....

But something odd is afoot in China. Duck prices are through the roof, while crab pricing remains low and stable. Other fish prices are level at best. West Coast crab fishers went so far as to strike this last January over a quarter per pound pricing dispute. It will still be a solid year for crabbers, but the boom and bloom is off, at least for the moment. We here at F.O.G. headquarters are confused, but to paraphrase a fish broker of our acquaintance, if we could predict swings in international trade and currency values, we wouldn't be selling frozen pork for a living. As ever, Puget Sound crab is the premiere crab throughout the Sino-Sphere, from Taipei to Hohhot, Puget Sound crab is golden. So we are focusing on drinking with those who face the fish, and letting the market take care of itself. Suffice it to say we have lots of beautiful crab, at a very fair price, for those who dare to dream. As for ducks, well, we can get them, but at a mighty price.... and to all and any, Happy Year of the Rooster. Ducks Up!!!!

Show Me The Money

Halibut Hustings.

Our friends at the International Pacific Halibut Commission released 2017 halibut seasons and catch limits on the 27th of last month. Fishing for our favorite flatfish will kick off March 11 and run 'till November 7th. Coastwide halibut quotas are up 5% to 31.4 million pounds, reflecting a growing biomass, but best of all our local quota is up a full 190,000# to 1,330,000#. As with all things on sea or land, halibut are subject to large swings in abundance. 2017 marks the third successive year of biomass and quota increases. If past patterns hold, we can look forward to up to ten years of further increases.

Lummi Love.
Alaska, BC and Coastal Halibut are all well and good, but our joy is the inside-caught fish. Our San Juans halibut feed on spot prawns, pink scallops and have a quality and flavor all their own and vastly superior to your garden-variety halibut. Larger Quotas for our tribal friends mean more fish for you. These past years we have made a tradition of circumnavigating San Juan County on the first day of halibut season. We visit with the fishermen, distribute healthy snacks to our favorites and deliver bait and fuel (and occasionally boots if forgotten at home) as needed. This marks for us the kickoff of our local, fresh fish season. Any and all are invited to join us. Dress warm, RSVP and BYOB.

March 11. Mark the date

Local Orbit 2-U!

Look for the roll-out of our new on-line ordering program in the next week or so. This will allow you to place orders and get real-time feedback on availability, quantities and delivery days. The aim is to streamline our process, tighten up information flows and provide late-night ordering options without getting Paisley out of bed.

Until next time, we are your Pink-Procuring, PSP Testing, Firewood Cutting, Rooster Crowing, Crab Bargaining, Halibut Lusting, Local Orbiting JFF Crew.

For customer service please reply to this email or call 360.468.0533

Fish-O-Gram, Election-Day Octo! Eastern Fishes! Look Landward! Halibut Farewell, Vachel Lindsay Does Election Night!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 20:00:00 +0000

A More Thoughtful Time....

Dear Tentacle-Minded Customers,

This year, our Jones Ranch November Surprise is that a dark-horse fish broker friend came through with unexpected dab of Giant Pacific Octo. We will have 1800# of hard-froze Octo-flesh in our possession Thursday. This will be backed up with our incoming, round Octo from Dutch Harbor, delayed now until the end of November. Whichever way the election goes, no matter your political persuasions, nothing says celebration, or solace, like slow-cooked Giant Pacific Octo.

Look Deep, Look East, Look West, Look South, Look Into the Freezer, Look Landward.

Look Deep.

With Halibut done, Coho just the smallest of trickles and West Coast bottomfish only available during brief weather windows, Mid-November is the time to get creative and get detail-oriented.

Local Delights

First and foremost in our list of Winter-Months fishes is Steelhead. We will get our first steelhead any day now and recommend them to all. Steelhead are sustainably harvested by tribal fisheries only, mostly in coastal rivers. There is a great deal of controversy surrounding steelhead. Last winter we dedicated a Fish-O-Gram to explaining our thinking on Steelhead. This missive may be found at http://jffarms.blogspot.com /search?updated-max=2016-01-17 T05:47:00-08:00&max-results=1. In any case, we proudly source, sell, recommend, eat, and feature steelies.

We will have fitful availability of Blackcod and the West Coast bottomfish throughout. Ling, True, Dover, Petrale and Rock, none of these are going away, but neither may any of them be counted on any given day. Inside-Waters Crab and dive fisheries are going strong, though always weather dependent. Improved dive fishery management this year promises a steady flow of Cukes and Urchin for the duration.

Eastern Fishes.

As last year, we are bringing in a steady stream of Monk, Skate Wings, Black Sea Bass, Squid and other Rhode Island delights. Looking forward, our Eastern friends will have Sardines, Mackerel, Butterfish and a decent flow of 20/30 dry-pack scallops.

Westward, Southward--Warm-Water Fishes,

Tuna, Albacore, Opah, Ono, Blue Marlin, Escular, Sword and Mahi are all readily available and reasonably priced. Everyone's favorite, freakishly over-sized flounder, California Halibut is coming soon. Grouper, or Groper, as the New Zealand version is known, are also coming soon. Groper is our favorite warm-water fish.

Freezer-Bound.

Here at Jones Ranch we have been plotting many months for this time of year. Our freezers are brimming with Octo, Spot Prawns, Nooksack Coho, Lopez Smelt and other frosty delights. Sara is plotting a JFF freezer-meat Clear Out Sale. Remember, the most sustainable fish is the fish already in the freezer. Stay tuned!!!

Ready for You

Land Creatures.

The JFF meats program is shifting into high gear, with a years' supply of Lambs, Hogs and Cattle to burn through. A wet, warm fall has the animals in deep, lush grass. It has been an excellent farm year, and the critters are finishing strong, fat and heavy. Call Sara or Paisley today!

It Has Been a Lush Fall

Halibut Report. Fisheries Management Corner.

Halibut is the great Western Book-End fish. The Season opens with a bang--our local halibut program is one of the year's highlights, and the end generally comes, as it did this year, with a bang and not a whimper. This years' halibut availability was excellent, pricing was stable if high and quality was very good. Halibut reproduction, like most fish love, is sporadic - recruitment (or entry of small fishes to the stock) can range from almost nothing to enormous numbers. Coast-wide, halibut catches are up and down, but have been on a general slide since 2004's catch of 76,000,000#. The low point was 2014 at roughly 27,000,000#. This year's quota, coast-wide, was 29,000,000#. The slide in catch has been driven by poor recruitment. So, what was seen are both declining catches and declining fish size. Now, following a string of excellent halibut reproduction years, we are seeing steadily larger fish and more of them. If current trends continue we should see quotas and catches climb by a few million pounds per year. Halibut fisheries are easy to manage, compared to Salmon and other mid-water fish. Halibut are fairly stationary and the resource oscillates over trackable, multi-year periods.

We're on the Upstroke

Alaskan and Canadian halibut fisheries are managed by Individual Fisheries Quota systems (IFQs), meaning that fisher-folk own a specified share of the resource. Alaska went to IFQs in 1995. prior to that the fishery was an open-access derby fishery- meaning that any boat could be licensed and pursue halibut during specified periods. Managers set the periods based on quota catch goals, then set the fleet loose. Back in the day, seasons were long and drawn out. As pricing and fishing effort climbed they shrank to almost nothing. What resulted was masses of frozen low-quality fish. Pricing over this time has increased five-fold, from an average boat price of $1-1.50# pre-IFQ to today's $7.50#+. We all remember halibut fish and chips, or halibut sandwiches from this era. Now, halibut is strictly a white-tablecoth fish. Rates for the rights to fish halibut, or IFQs themselves, have also soared during these years, and the fishery transitioned to an almost entirely fresh market fishery. In 1995, your F.O.G. correspondent almost bought 1000# of Southeast Alaska Halibut Quota for $4.00#. Right now, that quota would cost right around $60.00

There May be a Halibut Sandwich in Your Future

So halibut catch is way down, but income to the fleet is up and strong. We should see prices slide as quotas and catches climb in years ahead. 2017 Halibut will open sometime around March 15. Until then, stay strong!

Nail Biting Night. November 8, 1896.

It Didn't Work Out Like He Wanted.

As we all huddle around our media devices tonight, consider a race from times past. The Presidential election of 1896 marked a watershed moment in American politics. The candidates were William McKinley, full-figured, machine-driven establishment candidate from Canton, Ohio, and William Jennings Bryan, silver tongued Nebraska Orator and advocate for the rising, agrarian west. McKinley was known as the "Great American Buddha" While Bryan was dubbed the "Boy Orator of the Platte" or "The Peerless Leader" and is still considered among the greatest political speakers of all time. The key issue was whether to maintain a gold standard for American Currency or to begin backing greenbacks with silver. In short, the issue was whether to reward capital or labor, lenders or debtors, favor Eastern interests or Western strivers.

McKinley mounted a "Front Porch Campaign" during which he addressed, from his front porch, some 700,000 people who made the trek to Canton Ohio.

The People Come to Me

Bryan, by contrast, barnstormed the entire nation by rail and delivered over 500 speeches in 27 states.

So Close....So Close...

McKinley won, of course. Among the most disappointed was young Vachel Lindsay, shortly to become one of America's most celebrated poets. He wrote an extended lament about the election. It is meant to be sung or chanted aloud, not read. The entire thing is far too long to include here, but even today the poem, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan(http://www.poemhunter.com/bes t-poems/vachel-lindsay/bryan-b ryan-bryan-bryan/) is more than worth reading. How many poets could slip language like this into a political poem?

"The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rackaboor, the hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
The leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:-"

And the final lament,

"Election night at midnight:
Boy Brian's defeat.
Defeat of western silver.
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests and spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians, Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas, by the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and the silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream."

A Heated Exchange.

McKinley served his four years, was re-elected against Bryan again in 1900, and was assassinated by Steelworker and Anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz in 1901, elevating Teddy Roosevelt to the presidency. William Jennings Bryan ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee a total of three times, leading him to be dubbed the "Peerless Loser" He served as Wilson's Secretary of State until resigning to protest the rush to war after the Lusitania was torpedoed by German U-Boats in 1915. His last hurrah was to serve as prosecutor of a Tennessee high school teacher who tried to teach evolution in the famed Scopes Monkey Trial. Clarence Darrow represented the defense. Bryan won, but Darrow is widely seen to have argued circles around him, and the conviction was overturned on a technicality. Five days later Bryan died in his sleep.

Until next time, we are your Octo-Sourcing, Freezer-Fondling, Halibut-Huddling, Porch-Sitting, Pro-Wheat Voting, Barn-Storming, Posie-Spouting, JFF Crew. Just a call, e-mail or text away!

For customer service please reply to this email or call 360.468.0533

Fish-O-Gram, The Octo Edition, Crab Closures, Crab Openings, Diving Tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 02:22:00 +0000

Fall Plowing at Jones Ranch. She Can Help With the Rock Picking.

Dear Rock-Picking Customers,

Another October week past and now the holiday season is almost upon us. We here at Jones Ranch have been scrambling to get last minute dry-season work done. We have been preparing a field for fall planting to triticale and hay grasses. This marks the fourth time we have worked this ground since plowing the sod back in 2012. This process has been slowed by the rain and the incredible number of rocks to pick. It is extremely productive dirt, but the rock harvest is like something out of a fable involving dragons teeth, lusty maidens and a magic fountain. From 25 acres we have picked ten dump truck loads of rocks and every pass of the disk brings up more. The topsoil on this place is only maybe 14" deep and it is hard to figure out where the rocks keep coming from. Previous plowers left a stadium-sized rock pile in the woods. Lopez is blessed with abundant rocks. This is likely part of what drew the mostly Scotch-Irish farmer/settler folk to the island, lo these 150 some years ago--it reminded them of their own rock-bound homeland. This particular spot was known as the Maulsbey Place and until the mid-1960's had a small cabin in the middle of it. This cabin, after a few moves, is now situated in Lopez Village and serves as a vacation rental.

No Rocks, No Chickens. Nice Place to Stay.

Every spring we go and pick daffodils on the old house site, now that we have worked the ground the daffodils have divided and spread a bit, so a patch that was a tight 50' radius is now a scattered 200' strip. The last resident of the cabin before it was moved was an elderly firewood cutter from the steamboat days. Before the petroleum age, the mosquito fleet boats that served the islands ran on wood-fired steam power and burnt a phenomenal amount of firewood. Folks throughout the region made their living cutting the gnarled, old growth island timber for steamer fuel. This particular character ran a steam-powered stationary buzz saw set up on the East side of the island. Oxen dragged logs to the saw, where they were bucked into four foot lengths and split with black powder splitting guns. The principle was to load a powder charge into a bifurcated wedge that looked a little like a shoe-horn, drive it into the end of a 4' length of wood, then detonate the charge. When this worked it neatly split the round into manageable-sized chunks. When it didn't, it could fire the whole works of out of the log with explosive force. We remember any number of elderly San Juan Islanders with nasty scars and missing finger digits from splitting gun accidents. After the steamboat days ended firewood cutters switched to supplying the lime kilns on San Juan and Orcas with cordwood for cooking lime. Firewood cutters in those days had only to stack up wood along the shoreline. Sooner or later a steamer or kiln barge would come snuggle up to the bank on a rising tide and put all hands to work chucking cordwood aboard.

Our older farmer friends recall this man linking out his well deserved retirement in a two-roomed homestead shack along with a few hundred chickens, who lived with him in the cabin, a wallet full of antique cash money from the steamboat days, and an ever-present jug of rot gut whiskey.

I'd Rather be Drinking and Raising Chickens

Some of the rocks are quite beautiful. We have picked any number of pinkish, semi-translucent chunks of what appears to be granite. We are also seeing a great number of metamorphic rocks, and what appears to be shale. They are of a surprisingly uniform size, most of them just about the size of a man's head. Our science knowledge here at Jones Ranch tends more to biology than geology, and the rocks are pretty well caked with mud, but beyond the novelty aspect of the volume of rocks, the exercise has whetted our appetite to know more about the mysterious source of the endless rocks. Are they working their way up from the clay subsoil layer? And they being dropped by giant, night-flying birds? Are our neighbors salting the fields for the fun of seeing us sweat? In any case, we are doing our best to get the field done and planted before the soggy season fully shuts us out, but we will see. Here's hoping for a nice dry spell!

Alert! Octo Shortage!

Much to our shock and horror, we have found ourselves octo-less this last week or so. Giant Pacific Octo has long been our most stable and consistent product, when fresh fish falters, this eager freezer friend has seen us, and many of you, through. All of our regular sources have come up dry, actually some of our sources have been calling us for product. This is unexpected, given the huge volumes of octo generally floating around. As ever, when faced with a seafood supply question, the F.O.G. Truth Troops swung into action. Our octopus is by-catch in the Alaska cod fishery. Most of this comes from federally managed waters, all waters more than three miles off the coast, and the balance comes from Alaska State waters. Octo are caught in the cod longline, cod pot and cod jig fisheries, as well as in crab and drag fisheries. Catches range from 500,000#/yr- 2,000,000#/yr. Most of the catch is sold for bait--Octo is the best bottom-fish bait there is. Tentacles hold on hooks better than anything, and most bottom fish have a great, unrequited love for Octopus. Octo are delicious, highly intelligent and wily. The average cod or halibut has little chance of eating Octopus in any kind of fair fight. The rest of the Octo catch is sold for food, mostly to the Iberian countries. We peel off a goodly chunk for our friends and neighbors. Octo is our children's favorite lunch meat-cook off one Octo and you have meat for a week for a family of six.

Big Eight-Armed, Three-Hearted Monster--An Animal Like No Other.

Octopi are the most advanced members of the mollusk family. They are direct relations to clams, oysters and scallops.

Over 300 species of octopus haunt salt waters world-wide and are heavily targeted by fisheries throughout most of their range. The common Octopus, the most widely distributed species, is targeted by Spanish draggers working the Sahara Banks off Western Africa. This fishery yields 100 million plus pounds per year, animals that are not available for local folk. In many parts of the world octopi are caught by divers squirting bleach into caves- when the choking, blinded animal darts out the diver bags it. From a sustainability and fairness perspective, non-American Octo needs to be considered with a very jaundiced eye.

Globally the catch for all species is around 800 million pounds per year. This represents a huge increase over the past few decades. Like coyotes, white-tailed deer and starlings, Octopi are thriving in the Anthropocene. Their short life-cycle, prolific breeding and opportunistic feeding makes them uniquely well suited to modern times. One signature Octo trick is the ability to open crab and lobster pots and pull out the catch. Unlike Lopez-style crab poachers, the Octo neither close the pots back up, nor leave a beer for the disappointed crabber. On these shores targeted commercial fisheries have been conducted with strings of small plastic pots. The idea is that the creatures take up housekeeping in the pots, then hold fast while the pots are being pulled to the surface.

Octo typically live in fairly shallow waters--200 meters or less, though they can live deeper if they like. Their primary diet is crustaceans and shellfish. Octo can grow almost as fast as food is available, under ideal conditions they'd eat 30% of their body weight per day. If food becomes scarce they can hold at very low levels of metabolism. With eight wriggling arms Octo can overwhelm just about any prey unable to swim fast enough to get away and the hard beak of an octopus can crack through just about any shell. They also have a mild venom with which to subdue prey. Octopi have three hearts, an extremely efficient gill arrangement inside their body cavity--the Octo can pulse water through its gills to maximize oxygen assimilation, and they can direct absorb oxygen through their skin and into the blood stream. Octopi can change color at will, and have remarkable abilities to regulate their bodies at wildly varying depth-related pressures. Octopi learn faster than human children, usually they need be shown a function, like unscrewing a lidded jar with food inside, only once to achieve mastery. Octopi have been proven to use tools, build houses, and exhibit long-term memory.

The Biggest Octopus Lives in F.O.G Home Waters. Or Does it?

What a Terrifying Animal.

The Giant Pacific Octopus, our favorite species, ranges from So-Cal to the Korean Sea. The world record specimen weighed in at 600# and had a tentacle span of 30 feet. Old-time Nordic fishermen and whalers spoke of a much larger Octo, known as the Kraken. So vivid and numerous were the descriptions that Linnaeus included the Kraken, dubbed Microcosmus marinus in the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1735), a taxonomic classification of living organisms. This animal was large enough that mariners mistook them for islands and the whirlpools from submerging Kraken were strong enough to founder ships. Fishermen tried to find and follow the Kraken because of the huge schools of fish that followed them around. They were not actively hostile to humans, but would opportunistically eat drowning fishermen. Existence of the Kraken, like that of most sea monsters, has never been completely debunked.

Albert Tennyson was so taken by the notion of the Kraken he immortalized it in a sonnet, entitled, imaginatively, "Kraken"

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Octo-Apeasement.

Home of the Eurocrat. Soft on Cuttlefish. Hard on Taxpayers.

Octopus are extremely well-represented in literature and culture, we have been fascinated by them for as long as we have known of them. They also have a remarkable ability to inspire sympathy in humans, here in Puget Sound our targeted Octopus fishery has been closed for 20 some years. Local populations are extremely robust, but tender-hearted WDF&W staff closed the fishery for sentimental reasons--the man currently in charge has a soft spot for the wily creatures. Our urchin diver is the same way. One of his hard and fast rules for harvest divers is no harming the Octopi.
A few years ago the European Commission found time to issue a string of regulations regarding treatment of Cephalopods. Science experiments involving Octo, Squid and Cuttlefish must be "ethically evaluated", the emotional impact of experiments considered, and animals must be anesthetized before being cut on. So a cuttlefish is considered the moral equivalent of a chimp or dog, at least according to Brussels, and miss-treating them a felony. Look for a flowering of Octopi research in the newly-liberated Britain.

Why aren't they in charge?

It's only a matter of time

In most ways octopi are superior to human beings. They function, learn and live like high-order animals but reproduce like crab or fruit flies. After all, opposable thumbs are nothing on an animal with eight, independent, highly motile arms with suction cups. One female giant pacific octopus can lay and hatch up to 100,000 eggs. They can befuddle prey and predators with clouds of concealing ink. In theory, they are fully capable of developing technology to allow them to breathe on land. Had they done so, epochs back, we might be the ones cowering in caves while our eight-legged overlords strode the land, breathing through some sort of oxygenated water bubble tank. So, why aren't the Octo in charge? At the very least, why do they not rule their watery dominion as humans rule terra firma? Why do they not herd the flatfish from grazing ground to grazing ground,, like the Masai do cattle or the Sami do reindeer, why do Octo not build rock castles in the watery deep? Imagine if humans had to negotiate with the Octopi for the rights to drive piles, run underwater power lines, or fish a certain area.

Fatal Flaws; The Blood Will Tell.

90 Seconds Was All it Took

But for a few developmental, social and physiological flaws, Octopi might well be in charge. Firstly, their broad and slithering bodies use a phenomenal amount of oxygen. This is why Octopi can absorb oxygen through their skin and their gills--the gills simply can't keep up. Octopus blood is copper based, as opposed to our iron based blood. Copper blood is more efficient than iron-based blood at conducting oxygen in low-oxygen, cold-water conditions, but it limits octopus to short bursts of intense activity, rather than the sustained exertion that iron-based blood can support. Applied to land creatures, scientists say that copper-based blood could not support even a sheep at rest. Octopus actually have gigantic, blood-filled sinuses as blood reservoirs to flush oxygen to their extremities for brief periods of exertion. So Octo need to be very conservative with their expenditures of energy. A favorite public spectacle in post-war Puget Sound was Octopus Wrestling. Some exhibitions attracted as many as 5000 people to watch divers wrestle full-grown Octopi. For about 90 seconds a mature Octo can dominate the strongest of men. Once their blood oxygen is exhausted, the Octopus goes flaccid. In extreme cases, an Octopus can kill itself by exertion. On the seafloor, an Octo will generally not stray far from their den or cave. This need to be ever-close to shelter is a major impediment to any dream of World, or even Sea, domination. But Octos have a deeper flaw.

Co-operation Makes the Man.

Octopi Lack Unity.

Octopus are fairly short-lived--Giant Pacifics rarely live longer than five years and most smaller species are much shorter-lived. Both males and females die in the breeding process. Males shortly after intercourse and females shortly after the eggs hatch. So young Octopi do not get the benefit of any parental instruction. Once hatched they are cast to the tides to find their own first meals and a cranny to hide in. This makes development of any material or political culture very difficult. Even worse, Octopi are not gregarious--in fact, they are highly territorial and will drive away or kill any incoming youngsters seeking a foothold. This is one of the reasons cave-pots are an effective fishing method--there is a constant exodus of Octo desperate for a cave to call home and an unclaimed territory. For the moment, the anti-social tendencies of Octopus hold them down.

Alien Invaders.

This Doesn't Look Like an Earth Creature

The newly sequenced genome of Octopus, Squid and Cuttlefish reveal a genetic structure so different from other animals and marine life as to be effectively alien. The real shocker turns out to be that Octos have an enormous number of protein coding genes--33,000 in total, far more than humans do. What this means is that Octopi can change tissue cell function with a speed unseen in any other known living creature. This is why Octopi can learn so fast--they can permanently re-program their neural tissue almost instantly. Apparently the octopus genome is enriched in transposons, or “jumping genes,” which can rearrange themselves on the genome. With this kind of firepower, it stands to reason that Octopi can and will overcome their biological and social limitations at some point.

Giant Pacific Octopus and You.

Seattle is now in the throes of an Octo-Drought. One explanation is that the vageries of catch, demand, international markets and such have temporarily conspired to leave us bereft. The other is that catch is down because the Octo are learning from their mistakes and are plotting some sort of counter-strike. This is a deeply troubling prospect, and F.O.G. will be keeping a keen eye on the situation. We are currently scouring the news wires for any strange, potentially Octo-Related manifestations, like unexplained disappearances of fishing boats, unusual numbers of crab and cod pots coming up open and empty, or trawl bags cut open, raids on shore-side military depots or thefts of weaponry or tools and any evidence of deep-sea fortifications being constructed. Octopi are merciless, venom-packing predators unconcerned with Trigger Warnings and Micro-Aggressions and an Octo-Dominated future would likely be very rough on Seattle-Style progressive values. Clearly, our Cuttlefish-Coddling European "allies" are unfit to address the brewing threat. The future depends on us!

We Are All Getting Octo Beak Cufflinks.

Octo 2-U.

In the interim, the JFF rolodex has paid out and we expect a shipment of frozen Octo from a cod fisherman in Dutch Harbor in the next 10 days. These FAS Octo will be round, or uncleaned, and correspondingly cheaper than our typical offerings. We here at Jones Ranch are deeply excited about dissecting a Three-Hearted Animal. Other bonuses of a whole animal will be Octopus ink, a tasty pasta supplement, and Octopus beaks, which make fine jewelry and talismens. In the interim, we would offer our cleaned Rhode Island T&T as a substitute. Stay away from imported Octo, stay alert and stay tuned.

Crab Changes.

As of Friday the 28th, our state-licensed crab fleet is off the water, following a whirlwind 28-day season during which they caught almost 2 million pounds. This has been a phenomenal start to the season and we have every reason to expect this will be, as predicted, the all-time record Puget Sound crab season. Saturday and Sunday the lower-sound tribes opened in Skagit Bay, and there may be a few additional openers around the edges before the Lummis fire up in our waters, likely around the 7th or thereabouts. Our Crab tanks are full and we should bridge the gap with no troubles. Prices are likely to firm up some, but hopefully nothing dramatic. On the Coast the Quinault Nation will fire off sometime mid-November. Washington State-Licensed, Oregon and California fisheries will soon follow. Pricing will oscillate with these changes, but expect slow and steady increases towards the holiday season, a brief lull, then the real price spikes will come as we head into Chinese New Year and the tapering off of catches coast-wide.

Other Fishes.

Rhode Island Black Sea Bass kicks off Tuesday. Tautog are still episodically available. Halibut is on the home stretch. Halibut season closes November 7th and the quota is down to 500,000#. Mahi is limited, warm water Albacore is pricey, but generally available, Blackcod is fairly consistent depending on weather, as is rockfish. Call your certified Fish Expert today!

Tragedy at Lummi.

F.O.G. is saddened to report the death at sea of Lummi Harvest Diver Hank William Hoskins Sr. He was diving for cukes and urchins off Sucia Island Wednesday, the 26th of October when his air supply hose was severed by the support boat. Hank did not have any backup air, and drowned. We did not know Hank, nor buy his product, but everyone in the harvest community feels the loss of anyone on the water. It is a timely reminder of the risks water people take to supply us with seafood. Hank was 40 years old and a family man. Please join us in holding the Hoskins family in thought and prayer. We are ever-mindful of Walter Scott's admonition; "It's no Fish Ye're Buying, it's Men's Lives".

Until next time, we are your Rock Picking, History Buffing, Extremely Co-Operative, Tough on Octo, T&T Substituting, Diver Mourning, JFF Crew.

For customer service please reply to this email for Sara
and Paisley at sales@jffarms.com

or call 360.468.0533

Fish-o-gram, get your slug on!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 19:13:00 +0000

Get your Slug On! F.O.G. Book Review! Fall Fishes!! Raw Clams!! Beef's Up! The Votes are In! The Urchins Won!!

We are true believers, now.

Dear Holothurian-Hugging Customers,

For years now we have offered sea cucumbers, or Holothurians, as they are properly known, along with our other dive products. We, of course, love and stand behind all our offerings, but Cukes have been a neglected, unsung and un-pushed sideline for us. That neglect ends right here, right now. Cukes are a major fishery in our inside waters--the combined state and tribal quotas this year top 700,000#. As with everything else Puget Sound, our local Cukes are considered to be the best on the market and command a premium in China. Almost none of them are eaten domestically. These past few weeks we have come to a whole new appreciation for Cukes. We have been feeding on them, reading on them and hereby dedicate this Fish-O-Gram to the delicious, nutritious and wondrous sea slug.

Cukes are Food.

Diner Fare

For years we considered sea cucumber to be another Asian culinary peccadillo like rhino horn or jellyfish--our few encounters with them were fairly unsatisfactory. As it turns out, we were going at it all wrong. Cucumbers turn up in every waterfront cuisine and culture. They are found in every body of salt water, in huge numbers. Some estimates hold that Holothurians, in all their manifold glory, all 1700+ species, represent the largest collective biomass in the oceans, with gigantic population in the deepest depths of the ocean floor. If true, Cukes would be the most abundant animal in the world. Cukes are harvested in near-shore fisheries world wide, and almost all the product ends up in Asia, with China being by far and away the largest buyer. This past week at the JFF test kitchen we went through a full bucket of Cukes. We had them boiled, fricasseed, stewed, country fried, casseroled, souffled, baked and poached. We are born-again. Cukes are flat-out delicious, extremely versatile, and just strange enough to be big fun.

Cukes are Medicine.

Good for what ails you

Cucumbers are widely used in Chinese medicine for a wide range of ailments including fatigue, digestive problems, arthritis, sexual complaints, depression, gingivitis, gum disease and cancer. Recent western medical research is backing up the notion that Cukes are in fact a superfood, especially in relation to cancer treatments. Chinese diners draw a distinction between wild and farm-raised cukes, with the wild commanding a premium both for flavor reasons and as wild Cukes are thought to be more potent. We here at Jones Ranch have been feeling much perkier since our Cuke-a-Thon. The only comparable lift is that we get from early-season nettle infusions. And that persistent itch has cleared right up…….

Cukes are Amazing.

Just add sunlight.

Everybody knows that cucumbers can expel their innards at will to confuse predators. They are also the largest animals to function without a brain. Cukes do have a ring of neural tissue surround their mouth, but when this tissue is cut out for science experiments, lobotomized Cukes continue to function. Cukes are detritivores, they chew through bottom deposits like earthworms work through humus on land. As such, Cukes, in tandem with the gigantic populations of mesopelagic fishes, are likely the largest driver in global carbon cycles and deep-water sequestration. Some species are capable of regulating their body density to allow them to rise through the water column. Some species can launch themselves through the water for as much as a mile on one pulse. Some species incubate their young and live-birth their offspring, while most Cukes are broadcast spawners with free-swimming larvae. Deep in the ocean vast herds of Cukes roam like the buffalo of yore on the Great Plains. They seem to coordinate their migrations, so as to constantly work fresh ground. Cukes are mildly toxic to most marine species--only humans and a few specialized predators eat them. One species is fully pelagic, meaning it swims and circulates with fishes and jellies. An Atlantic species, Elysia Chlorotica, has the ability to borrow photosynthetic chloroplasts, and borrow the DNA required to make more chloroplasts, from algae and themselves begin to photosynthesize. Young Elysiums only eat until they secure the needed DNA? Ever afterward, they are self-sufficient on solar power and they never use their digestive systems again.

Cukes are Historic, Popular and Profitable.

They're screaming for them in Shanghai.

Asian consumers have been on to Cukes for a very long time. The first documented trade contact with Australia involved a three cornered trade with Macassan traders winging between China, Sulawesi and Eastern Arnhem Land of North Australia. The Aboriginal Yolngu people exchanged dried cucumbers for Chinese made tools, textiles and tobacco as early as 1400 AD. Today Cukes are harvested world-wide. Puget Sound product generally garners the highest prices and greatest demand. Prices hit a high-water mark in 2013 with boat prices reaching $6.75#. At the time the inside quota was close to a million pounds, so we are talking real money. In Mexico, gun battles were reported amongst Cuke divers in the sea of Cortez, and we know of a tribal fisherman who outfitted his purse seiner to drag for Cukes. He was working in 500 ft of water, bringing up huge bags of cucumbers along with thousands of smashed crab and Volkswagen-sized boulders.

State and tribal managers swiftly nipped that one in the bud, but there is nothing like a fishery in boom-times to make for interesting stories. On the consumer side, one Puget Sound cucumber was reportedly worth upwards of $160 in China.. Word was a few years back that senior government officials and gangsters made a point of eating imported cucumber daily, just to prove they could.

The secret is a cuke a day

Almost every coastal nation is now engaged in large-scale cucumber farming, with the exception of the United States. In 2008 China produced 321 million dollars in aquacultured cukes. The figures now are likely at least twice that. Cukes are grown in tidal ponds or lagoons and fed cultured macroalgae.

Prices now are still robust, but the frenzy is off. High-end imported seafood became a symbol of government corruption in China, and incoming Chinese president Xi Jinping made Cukes a special target of a massive anti-corruption campaign. Imported Cucumbers have been hit with punitive tariffs and citizen activists now shame bureaucrats by posting cell phone videos of them scarfing Cukes. Of course, this means that Cukes, like Geoducks, are now being smuggled into the country through Hanoi and Hong Kong. Professional Cuke and Duck mules strap seafood to their undershirts with duct tape and walk across the border. This product now is now generally eaten behind closed doors. In this way millions of pounds of product makes its way into mainland China.

Cukes are poetic--F.O.G. book review.

F.O.G gets literary

The Japanese have long been eager sea cucumber consumers. Cukes are more than just food or just medicine for the Japanese. Cukes are considered to be masterful and wise, deep and desirable. An animal with no brain, which migrates in thundering herds, who processes detritus into some of the finest protein on earth. Cukes feature in cartoons, movies, novels, pop songs and religion, as well as in cuisine. Maybe best developed, though, is sea cucumber haiku.

F.O.G was delighted to stumble onto a compendium of translated Cuke-themed haiku. Titled, "Rise, Ye Sea Slugs" by Robin Gill. This book is a must have for any serious student of seafood culture. It includes such Holothurian trivia as the first recorded mention of Cukes in Japanese literature, Kojiki, or Records of Ancient Matters. In this tale, the Gods round up all the fish of the world and ask if they are ready to serve the children of the gods, better known as the Japanese. Only the sea cucumber does not respond, and so the Sun Goddess pulls out her knife and slashed the cucumber's mouth. This explains why Cuke mouths are so stark, no tongue, no lips, just an opening.

A few selections;

Cukes and You.

We do birthday parties, pony rides, haiku, clam shucking….

It is high time we here in the Puget Sound get on the Holothurian train. Surely we can develop a cucumber-culture on our fair shores. Maybe haiku is not going to happen, but why not Cuke Hip Hop? Not only are Cukes wonderful, but they are among the most available local seafoods. The tribes have wisely elected to spread out their Cuke quota by limiting harvest to two days a week. Our state divers are currently conducting a small mop-up fishery. Cukes are available August-June, always subject to weather, of course. If you find yourself entertaining corrupt bureaucrats, gearing up for a haiku slam, in need of a restorative tonic, or just want to wow your jaded customers, JFF’s got your slug!!! Our trained crew of Sea Slug-Costumed Mimes is also available to help stir up customer enthusiasm.

Fall-time fishes.

Big Kiss From Rhode Island

As we wend our way into the twilight of 2016 fresh salmon is becoming a memory, halibut is down to the last few hundred thousand pounds of quota, and west-coast bottom fish become a weather-chancy item. Black cod season is in full tilt, but is ever-subject to stormy conditions. Beyond the still bargain-priced crab, inscrutable Cukes, phenomenal urchins and the other deep-winter stalwarts, we have some seasonal delights from our Eastern Friends. Monk is ever popular, Black Sea bass begins November 1 and for a few weeks we are well set for Tautog. This northern wrasse has all the love of a southern fish and all the clarity of a Northern animal. Tautog is your best bet for shaking off those restaurant week blues. 8# average size round. Call today!

Half shell heroes!!!

Just Slide the Knife in the Gap.

For years now we have striven to produce enough littleneck clams to being pushing a raw clam option in the raw bars of Seattle. This lovely native clam has been largely left behind with the popularity of Manila and now Savory clams for steaming. These two species make excellent cooked clams, but are a little lacking in the raw. Half-shell clams are a staple of East Coast shuckers, but have not caught on in our far corner. We now have enough supply to begin pushing this culinary sensation and we aims to change all that. Littlenecks have a light, crunchy, crisp flavor that provides the perfect foil to a fine local oyster selection. Look for your JFF rep bearing clam samples in days to come! The key element in successfully shucking clams is to use a thin-bladed knife and cut down through the division of the shell, not to attack from the rear like an oyster.

Beef Coming.

Man Does Not Live by Cukes Alone.

Fish may pay the bills and fill our hearts, but we remain avid farm-folk here. This past Monday we butchered two chubby, luscious, entirely grass-fed beef from the Mainland Cattle Company. They will hang for two weeks then be cut to your specs. Look for a meat-themed Fish-O-Gram in coming weeks. Big news brewing on this front.

The Good Guys Won.

A Thorny Welcome for Cream Skimmers.

Last Fish-O-Gram we discussed a pending vote in the State Urchin dive fleet. The question at hand was whether to open red urchins with a weekly per-boat quota. This is important because with rising interest and pricing on urchins, the dive fishery is beginning to attract a Cream Skimmer population of divers. Our resident divers tend to focus on quality and price, and like to work steadily. Cream Skimmer operators hopscotch up and down the coast. They want to hit fisheries hard and fast, then move on to the next fishery and state. Cream Skimming thinking is the reason all but 14000# of the state Cuke quota was thumped in six weeks this summer. For Puget Sound urchin, this means harvesting huge volumes, as much as 5-6000# per diver, per day, and shipping them to California for processing and, primarily, export. Again, this is terrible for local access to the resource, and yields poor quality uni. The votes are in, and we are delighted to announce the state red urchin season will open Monday the 24^th with an 1800# per boat, per week quota. So allocated, we will have Reds through the new year, the quality will be high, and the Cream Skimmers will stay in Alaska or head down the coast to California.

Until next time, we are, a phone call or email away, your Cuke-Cuddling, Bottom Crawling, Photosynthesizing, Politician Feeding, Haiku Spouting, Tautog Importing, Cow Killing, Urchin Electioneering, JFF Crew.

For customer service please reply to this email or call 360.468.0533

FIsh-O-Gram, Local Crab Bonanza!! Caviar Returns! Dive Fisheries Update!! Fresh King Crab!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 14:46:00 +0000

Dear Crab-Crazed Customers,

Here They Are!!!

This past October 1st our tribal and state-licensed friends kicked off another regular Dungeness crab season. The tribes fished through October 8th, then pulled off the water, while the state fleet will keep going for another couple of weeks. Waterfronts in Bellingham, Anacortes, Port Angeles and Blaine are thumping and bumping, and millions of dollars are changing hands. As usual for this time of year, we are seeing the nicest, largest, fattest crab and the lowest pricing of the season. This years' abundant sunshine has triggered a boom throughout the food chain here. The crab, and by extension, you, are reaping the benefits of those glorious sunny days. Coastal crabbing will begin opening in about a month, Puget Sound crab catches will taper off and pricing will rise towards the holiday season. Like everything else in our blessed waters, Puget Sound crab are something special. They grow and play in some of the most dynamic waters in the world, massive tidal exchanges coupled with the warmth, richness and biological productivity of all the little bays around the region. Our inside-waters crab are fatter, tastier and more vigorous than other populations of Dungeness. Chinese buyers have become the largest buyers of local crab--most restaurant crab consumed in the Seattle market is coastal crab, silently swapped out for our superior animals. These few weeks in mid-fall are the best time to showcase Puget Sound Crab.

State of the Resource.

Where the Magic Happens

Years back the Puget Sound crab fishery was a biological backwater and economic afterthought, a minor detail compared to the then-mighty salmon fishery. The long-term average catches generally swung between 2-3 million pounds per year. Sport fishers took roughly 1 million of these pounds, with the balance caught by state licensed commercial crabbers. Prices were fairly low, and there was not much of a differentiation in the market between Coastal and inside crab. Beginning in the early nineties a series of biological, management and economic changes flipped everything around to where now, Puget Sound Crab is the largest wild fishery by value in the inside waters. First to change was a series of WDFW salmon management changes that had a disastrous impact on Puget Sound Coho and King salmon stocks. Following this, crab catches began to steadily ratchet upwards, by 250,000-500,000# per year. Next was the Rafeedie Decision in 1995. This decision extended the principle of 50% resource sharing between state and tribal fleets from salmon to all marine resources, including crab. Tribal catches of crab exploded from a few hundred thousand pound in 1994 to over 2 million pounds in 1995--contributing to an overall catch of over six million pounds--twice the long-term average. Since then the resource has gone from strength to strength. Last year total Puget Sound harvest was over 11 million pounds and this year looks to be better yet. The other big changes are that WDFW has been steadily transferring crab quota from the commercial fleet to recreational users and, beginning in the mid-2000's, Chinese demand began driving the price ever upward. Last years' catch was worth upwards of 40 million dollars, not counting sport catches. Salmon catches and pricing has crashed over this period. For Puget Sound Fisher-Folk, Crab is now King. So boomtimes for our tribal friends, and even for the state licensed fishers. Despite losing half the resource to the tribes, then half again to the sports, state commercial catches, in pounds are twice what they were just 20 years ago and income to the fleet is up 8-fold in that time. State crab permits have risen in value from $5000 in 1995 to $150,000 today.

It's not just a White Man's game anymore.

Primary Production Will Tell

Humans generally target mid-upper level representatives of the marine foodchain. Here in Washington we eat Shrimp, Crab, Salmon, Shellfish, Halibut, various other Bottomfish, and once in a while, a few Smelt or Herring. We tend to track abundance in these species as if they are indicators of overall biological health or productivity. But the drivers of all this, the phytoplankton that feast on sunlight and dissolved nutrients, spring eternal. A terrific example of this is the Newfoundland Cod Fishery. Everybody knows the story of the Cod Collapse. But a much less-told tale is that Snow Crab and Lobster boomed with the cod gone. The principle is simple--primary productivity will burn on and something, anything, will convert it to increasingly complex, and tasty, life forms. So ups and downs in one species or another are a guaranteed windfall for something else. Primary production is not only unstoppable, it is actually increasing these days as higher atmospheric carbon levels make for more plant food. Add in a string of sunny summers as we have been having and the sky's the limit. Here at Jones Ranch Shellfish Division, we see and feel the ups and downs of primary production in how the oysters grow. We see a huge difference in oyster growth between sunny and overcast years. Again, these past year have been phenomenal. Another marker of the incredible productivity of our waters is the biomass of pink scallops and other filter feeders, including a massive population of geoducks, at low depths. Literally hundreds of millions or billions of pounds of hungry bivalves haunt the floors of Puget Sound. Their only diet is dormant, or cystic phytoplankton. So, after everything up top gets done feeding, there is still enough plankton left over to sift down and feed this gigantic deep-water biomass.

Can't nobody stop the plankton.

Trump, Puget Sound Crab and You.

In this election season, buying, serving and singing our local crab is the least a local patriot can do. Last week F.O.G. was appalled to see a flagship downtown restaurant triumphantly advertise Oregon Coast Dungeness, as if it was a selling point, not a measure of shame. In this fleeting moment of large crab, big numbers and low prices, nobody has an excuse for serving out-of-bioregion crab. That would be like voting for, well, you know........

One Crab, One Vote.

Caviar returns to a Hungry City

Breakfast at Jones Ranch

Jff Is delighted to announce the first Salmon Caviar, or Ikura shipment of the season. This year our caviar is exta-fine, coming as it does from Unalakleet Alaska, a small Native city on the banks of the Unalakleet river in far Western Alaska. Chum salmon are netted by skiffs in the river, speedily dressed and the roe processed into golden Ikura. Alaska pink and chum salmon catches were well below forecasts this year and stocks of #1 ikura are extremely short this year. Availability will be spotty and we will run out. Get your name on a tub now!

Best Caviar is found where the river bends.

Dive Fisheries Update.

We here at Jones Ranch love our dive products maybe above all other things. Part of this, surely, is the ever-elusive nature of divers and the resources they pursue. It just wouldn't be the same if we had dive products at our fingertips, Cucumbers and Urchins would likely become an object of familiarity and mild contempt like tilapia filets.

No fear of that happening. This year so far has been a study in deferred gratification on everything dive-caught. From Cukes to Urchins to Pink Scallops, nothing has been straightforward this year. First, both State and Tribal cuke season fired off on August 1 with a slightly reduced cucumber quota. The state fleet thumped almost their entire quota in 6 short weeks. Meanwhile the tribal divers set themselves a reasonable weekly individual quota to spread their fishery out, then promptly closed it to go crabbing. On Urchins the State divers chose to open greens but delay reds 'til late November. Early catches of greens have tested at middling roe percentages, meaning export buyers are lukewarm on them. As of now we are waiting on voting results from the state fleet as to whether or not to go to weekly individual weight restrictions and open reds again.

The tribes opened both reds and greens on September 23, but then closed again for crab season. The tribes are also new to the urchin fishery and there is a substantial learning curve to picking good urchin. Overall this year on quality, we have been pleased but not overwhelmed and we have also seen some early stress-spawning on the greens. Our inside waters are still quite warm and this is likely keeping the urchins from putting on that last little polish. They are due to cool substantially over this weekend with the incoming storm systems.

Pink Scallops are still in DOH limbo as they drag their feet on opening an area with commercial quantities of product. So, order away on Cukes and Urchins, but don't get into any life-threatening situations counting on product availability. Incidentally we have been playing with cukes these last weeks in the Jones Ranch test kitchen. Look for recipe hints in upcoming Fish-O-Grams.

All we can promise is that we'll keep trying.

Fresh King Crab Again.

Once a Year. Expect Frosty Shells

Alaska Red and Blue King Crab seasons fire off October 15 and we expect the first fresh product on the 18th. This is a special program put together by one of our favorite figures in the West Coast seafood business. This gentleman has been in the business a very long time, been extremely successful and now focuses on specific fun projects. Only a tiny fraction of the catch goes out fresh--98% is cooked and frozen for ease of handling. Our crab is captured, brought into King Cove, cooked, then dunked into the brine-freeze tank until the shell freezes but the meat does not, then pulled and packed in 32# cases. This process allows for distance transportation in a fresh state. When they arrive at your cantina, merely pop them in salted, boiling water for a few minutes and wow customers and staff alike. Again, frost on the shells is a desirable condition, and one that has a lot of science behind it.

The 2016 quota has been cut substantially. Prices will be higher than last year and the season will be short this year, though we may end up being lucky on this front--our friend may hold some crab live in King Cove to stretch the fresh season out 'till Thanksgiving, because he himself wants some for his own dinner.

Until next time, we are your Puget Sound Crab Chauvenist, Vodka Swilling, Cucumber Boiling, King Crab Frosting, JFF Crew. Dedicated to bringing you the best, most quintessential Northwest Sea-to-Table and Farm-to-Table Protein Specialties.

Fish-O-Gram Returns! Nooksack Coho! Urchins Ahead! Lambs to the Slaughter! Chef’s Corner—Jerked, Strangled or Rolled—How Do You Prefer Your Salmon?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 14:28:00 +0000

Fish-O-Gram Returns! Nooksack Coho! Urchins Ahead! Lambs to the Slaughter! Chef’s Corner—Jerked, Strangled or Rolled—How Do You Prefer Your Salmon?

It has been a good summer

Dear September-Loving Customers,

Your loyal Fish-O-Gram correspondent is now free of the labor of last long months--tank scrubbing at the shellfish hatchery. For those shellfish minded of you, be of good cheer. We produced some millions of sterile triploid and sexually normal pacifics, a healthy crop of European Flat seed and a smattering of clam, geoduck and kumo seed. As regular Fish-O-Gram readers know, making the hatchery work has been an existential struggle for us these past years. This spring we went all out for oyster reproduction, and it has been a successful season, but some things fell by the wayside. It was a needful thing, but plastic-bucket oyster love has been a poor substitute for creating the weekly paean to waterfront life and fish flesh that is the Fish-O-Gram.

An Embarrassment of Culinary Riches.

September marks the transition of seasons, and we slide into our favorite time here at JFF, the junction between last fleeting flavors of summer salmon, like regret on the tongue and the first promises of winter, like San Juans urchin, fat from a summers' kelp grazing, clicking, shuffling, samurai Dungeness, yellow-fat from their long summer feast, the years' first ikura and yearling oysters, plump and polished like edible pearls. Here at Jones Ranch we have been enjoying our handful of summer melons. Dusted with sea salt and washed down with a crisp Westcott Bay Cider, there is nothing finer in the vegetable kingdom than a Lopez grown muskmelon. So the Fish-O-Gram is back, ready to sing the glories of North-End protein to customers new and old, near and far. And it has been a good summer, thank you all.

Blue Ribbon Coho

Love From Lummi--Nooksack Coho!!!!

Lummiland. Abundant Coho, Sensible Resource Management.

The Silver Horde.

These past weeks Lummi has been abuzz as only a fish town can be during a big run. Sharp eyed, news-following readers will recall Washington Fish and Wildlife generated headlines about terrible coho salmon returns justifying a total closure of the non-treaty coho season. As is often the case, WDFW got it completely wrong. Coho have been pouring into area rivers. The runs have been early, look to be much larger than predicted and individual fish are pounds larger than average. The Tribes manage their fisheries based on what actually shows up, rather than what state computers predict. So WDFW continues to manage as if we are in crisis, the non-treaty fleet sits on the beach, the fish steadfastly refuse to behave like an arcade game and our Canadian and Tribal friends are enjoying the best coho fishing in a decade or more. Once again, we thank our lucky stars and Judge Boldt for cutting in the tribes on Washington State Fisheries Management. The best thing about WDFW is that at least, post-Boldt decision, they can only mismanage 50% of the fishery.

The machine that would rule the seas.

Nooksack Coho and You.

A large coho run is very good news for the Lummi Nation and good news for JFF. And what is good for JFF is good for you. These Nooksack fish are an annual benchmark in the fish-based Jones ranch diet. They feed almost exclusively on crab larvae and so the flesh is a vibrant, blood red, rather than the typical bubble-gum pink Alaskan coho. The flavor is delicate and fatty, as expected with a coho, but also deep and rich, almost crustacean like. These fish are spectacular in any setting, but their subtleties find their highest expression in cured and smoked preparations. Pickled, gravlaxed, cold smoked or raw, the Nooksack Coho is without equal. They are like no other coho. We love working with the Finkbonners, our Lummi counterparts, and we love trumpeting better, local fish. 70-100 skiff fishermen are working daily to bring the coho to market. These are low-budget, hometown operations—a few folks are fishing out of rowboats $1000+ a day! We are delighted to see the small-time fisherfolk get some love. This bonanza will last for some weeks yet, don’t miss out! Reward sound resource management! Don't let the computers win!! Strike a blow for humanity!! Nooksack Coho will change your life!!!!

The science is clear. Nooksack Coho are best.

Urchins Too.

The State green fishery opens on Sept. 26. The state dive fleet voted to hold off on reds until late November, but our tribal friends are kicking off both reds and greens this next week. Assuming we can track down a non-flaky diver, we will have a steady supply of urchin through January. Stay tuned for more information and the first taste of the season.

It’s going to be a spiny, jolly fall.

Department of Land Based Activities.

Our Golden Harvest.

We cut our last Barley field Monday and we are delighted to report a bumper crop. 2016 was a textbook grain year, weather-wise. Warm dry weather early allowed us to plant the entire crop by May 15, then summer rains pushed the crop through till August heat cured the grain heads. We harvested 170 tons of fat, beautiful grain on 100 acres. This will feed our hogs through the winter and, if we get our act together, make a good slug of whiskey as well.

Lambs Frolic on Stubble.

Now that the grain is cut, the lambs and goat kids roll onto the barley fields to eat the weeds and sprouted, spilled grain. This is yet another trick borrowed from the Lopez old-time farmers. Lambs will gain up to a pound a day on this diet, and meat built on a fast gain is tender and succulent. Our spring lambs are up to weight and will finish fat on the barley stubble these coming weeks. Order Now!!!

Chef’s Corner. Killing Them Softly.

A customer recently asked for delivery of a live coho in order to practice Ike jime, a ritualized, Japanese method for killing fish. Ikejime calls for swiftly killing fish with a spike to the brain, then bleeding the fish out via a slash to the tail--think a cross between acupuncture and Kosher slaughter. Done right, Ike jime techniques prevent stress-caused lactic acid buildup in the flesh. Word is that a fish so dispatched is a culinary experience utterly different from violently killed fish. Typically this is done with farmed or fresh-water fishes, for obvious reasons, but assuming you could track down and approach a sufficiently relaxed wild salmon, there is no reason Ike jime techniques couldn’t be used, and nobody, to our knowledge, has really tried.

The trick is to get the fish to relax.

We love a challenge, and we love culinary adventure. We started thinking hard about the comparative methods for catching and killing salmon. So we thought we would run down some basics of how we source fish, and begin to consider how we could incorporate Ike jime principles into JFF operations.

When considering salmon quality and palatability, there's much written and lots of folklore about quality as relates to bruising, blood retention and other measurable standards of fish handling. Furthermore there's all the variables of run timing catch area fish diet and such-- the operative principle being that fish quality generally degrades the closer they get to fresh water, and that all runs are not created equal in terms of eat-ability. Very little is known, even by the most careful observers in the business, about how stress during capture impacts flavor. The three primary means of taking wild salmon, in ascending order by volume caught, are troll, or hook and line fishing, gillnetting, or entanglement netting, and purse seining, wherein fish are encircled in a heavy meshed net. Incidentally, the degree of control farmers have over the death of pen fish, and so control over flesh blemishes, remains the greatest selling point, quality wise, for farmed fish and uneven flesh quality is the greatest persistent weakness in marketing wild fish.

Troll Salmon--Jerked Around

Troll salmon remain the Acme standard for quality. Trollers generally fish in the open ocean, meaning that they target fish in their quality prime. Troll catches are generally low volume and each fish is handled carefully, bled while still alive, gutted soon after. Some of the more progressive figures in the business are using small catheters and low-pressure pumps to flush blood out of the fish through the circulatory system. From a flesh quality perspective, and the handling perspective, troll fish cannot be beat, but the technique has limitations insofar as sockeye and chum do not readily take hooks. Furthermore, coho salmon put on a tremendous growth spurt as they approach the river. An ocean coho, while pristine, will generally be smaller and lack the fattiness and flavor finish of an inshore fish. Fish are fought individually on a steel wire, then brought onboard with a gaff hook, clubbed and bled out. From a stress point of view, this kind of hand-to-hand combat is about as brutal as it gets. It is hard to see how trolling could ever pass Ike jime muster.

Photogenic, yes, but stressful.

Gillnet Salmon--Lovingly Strangled

Gillnetting is generally done closer in-shore. This means the fish are more apt to be already naturally declining and quality, though again as in the case with coho, this can be a good thing. Gillnetting is the most flexible of techniques. It can be done in shallow water or deep- muddy or clear- from a large boat, a skiff, or from shore. Gillnets catch almost all of the fresh market sockeye. Copper River, Baker River, Yukon River & Quinault sockeye and kings are all gillnet caught. Properly handled post-harvest, a gillnet fish can match the quality of troll. During the dying process, gillnets are surprisingly gentle. The fish swim into the net, tangle around the gills or body, and then after the initial shock of contact and brief fight they gently swim themselves to death. The downsides are bruising that may occur around the neck and the likelihood of substantial scale damage. Catches are generally modest and the well-intentioned fisher can do an excellent job handling her catch. Overall, gillnetting has good potential for both quality flesh and a low stress death.

Let this be an example to the others.

Purse Seine Fish--Generally Brutalized

It’s a good thing they are going in a can.

Purse seining generally occurs inshore and generally targets higher volume, lower value fish such as pink and chum salmon. Some substantial volumes of sockeye are seine caught, but most of this fish ends up in the canned or frozen export markets. The fundamental flaw with purse seining is the roughness in which fish are handled. The nets are stretched across the water, towed against the current, then circled back with the bottoms pursed up, Then the net is slowly spun back on board. The fish remain in the water in most of the net is back on board. The fish are either rolled aboard over the stern or pulled out of the net with a gigantic hydraulically operated dipnet. Either which way the fish are smashed up and rolled around in stinging red jellies, not to mention emotionally traumatized. Once on board they are released from the net to flop themselves to death on deck or in the fish hold. Post harvest care, bleeding, dressing, etc is non-existent in seine fish. Seine caught Coho and King are particularly dubious. The lack of love-handling with these fish is disastrous for their soft-flesh. An ice water bath in the fish hold is generally as good as it gets. Incidentally, one major fish distributor in the Seattle market specializes in cleaning up seine fish for the restaurant and retail trades. The best thing you can say for much of this fish is that it is easy to chew. Ike jime practices are is out of step with the seine fishery as a lute would be at an Onyx concert, a popular band with Seine crewmen.

We handle almost no seine fish for these reasons. Some years back a Sitka Alaska fisherman of our acquaintance tried to revolutionize seining for fish quality. He used a smaller net, made shorter sets, released excess fish beyond what he knew he could handle. He then brought small batches of fish aboard at a time to be stunned and bled, very similar to a troll fishery treatment. The result was fantastic flesh-quality product, proving that seine fish can be treated well. Unfortunately he went bankrupt and is now working in the Bakken oil fields. To slightly paraphrase H.L. Mencken, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the tastes of the American public"

JFF and Ike Jime

Of the three primary fishing techniques, Fish-O- Gram is of the opinion that a gillnet fish experiences the lowest stress levels of these three techniques. In order to really test this, we would need to come up with troll and gillnet caught fish caught in roughly the same areas, roughly the same level of fish maturity, and have them be handled roughly the same way post-capture. This is not likely to happen. Perhaps the best way to test this hypothesis is to personally try and develop a palette for flavor subtleties associated with fish stress levels.

In the interest of science and culinary advancement, Fish-O-Gram, along with the crew of the Willows and the ever-accommodating fisher folk of the Lummi Nation, will be conducting experiments these coming weeks searching for a true Ike jime fish killing experience on wild salmon. Stay tuned

Salish Sea Festival, October 15th Rosario Resort Orcas Island.

Join us, JFF, The Willows, Rosario and many others at the Salish Sea Festival next month on Orcas Island. Come explore the seafood of the Salish Sea Basin through seminars, field trips and food.

http://www.visitsanjuans.com/events/salish-sea-festival

We are, your Fish-O-Gram Writing, Sno-Cone Shaving, Coho Probing, Barley Cutting, Fish Strangling, Samurai Sword Wielding, Orcas Visiting, JFF Crew!!

Fish-O-Gram!!! Here we (Halibut) go again!!! Price Wars on the Inside! Fish Business, a Love Story. Crab, Blackcod! Eastern Fishes! Pink Power Play, Geology in Action!! JFF Meats!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:49:00 +0000

From Island Waters to you!

Two eventful weeks have come and gone since F.O.G. has had a chance to put pen to paper. Our local halibut season kicked off on March 20, one day later than previously announced and was limited to 39 hours rather than the usual and expected 48. We are now into Halibut Opener #2. These changes were the result of inter-tribal jockeying. Makah and Quillayute started at noon on Saturday the 19th as advertised, the inside tribes kicked off Sunday at 7am and Quinault held back 'till Monday morning the 21'st. In this high-stakes poker game each tribe weighs their own perceived interests against those of the other tribes, set against ornate market, logistical and weather plays. Sadly for the inside tribes that we call friends and partners, the 2016 playbook favored coastal tribes against the inside fisheries. Sunday night/Monday weather kicked up to the point that the boats had trouble even retrieving their gear. So Makah had a clean shot with decent weather, while inside fishers lost about half the 39 hour period. Accordingly, catches were heavily weighted to the Coast.

Sucka! those are my fish!

Rumble on the Water

On the Inside we had a nasty price war that drove prices far higher than we expected--a new buyer has emerged targeting Lummi-caught fish. This high-end grocery oriented buyer has been a small player in the boutique salmon market for some years, but this was their first foray into the tribal purchasing world. Fish business is riddled with chuckholes and inside knowledge, and tribal fish business is all the more so. In order to operate smoothly in the tribal world, as with any subculture, including the Seattle Restaurant World, it helps to know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. We have always worked with tribal fish buyers for just this reason. This new buyer did exactly the opposite of this--They fielded two buying boats and appealed directly to the fishermen through Facebook with an offer of $.50 above market. Predictably, the price exploded and the new buyer cracked. Long-established buyers at Lummi found their fishermen bolting and retaliated by calling in boat and bait loans and cutting guys off on bycatch markets, the new outfit ended up hugely short of the volume which they had contracted for, and everybody on the buy side took a terrible beating on margin.

Moving Forward

We have been some days trying to sort out the wreckage, and a degree of calm has returned to the sandbox. Most, but not all of the principle parties are again speaking with each other. And while this was perhaps a classic market price storm, the biggest news is the dog that did not bark--these past years Ocean Beauty has been the largest buyer of inside fish, through the big-dog shore plant at Lummi and your devoted friends at JFF have been number 2. This has been an irritant for us, in that we have worked very hard to create a special place in the market for these superlative fish, and then every year OB would backwash 4-60,000# of inside Halibut onto the general market. Ocean Beauty has now stepped aside for the new operation--they have a distribution agreement and so chose not to compete with one another--and between the Newbies and us, 80+% of these fishes are now being purchased, handled and marketed as something unique and wonderful.

So, the higher-than expected halibut pricing you saw last week, while uncomfortable, is merely the birthing pangs of a new, glorious order of halibut supply lines for inside product. Spreading the pain, we all live to fight another day. And as reported in a previous Fish-O-Gram, strong demand for Skate helped balm bidding-war induced financial wounds. For the weeks ahead halibut pricing will return to more or less normal--oscillating between the mid-10s and mid-12s.

We were deluged with beautiful, well-sized, lovingly handled but overpriced inside halibut. Our S'Klallam friends did particularly well and we have been enjoying those fish thanks to Super Buyer Jamie Torpey.

Opening number 2 fired off Friday the 1'st and closed 2pm Saturday. Fresh Local Halibut Once Again, at much more reasonable pricing!!!! The second opener went off smoothly, with Lummi enjoying greater catches, while the Southern Tribes were blown off the water for the second half of the opener. We have ample supplies of all sizes of halibut for you! One more opener is expected for the first week in May. More facts and analysis about the halibut fishery next F.O.G!

Local Boats, Local Fishes

They That go Down To The Sea in Ships; Or, Why F.O.G. Loves the Seafood Business

Last opener, late Monday evening, the 21st, your F.O.G correspondent was cruising North to Lummi and received a frantic phone call from the Cornet Bay wing of the Jones/Puget Sound Seafoods buying venture. Seems the crew at Cornet, while driving their 28' box truck and brand new pickup truck, had been pulled over and and not one of the three-man crew had a drivers license. They did not get arrested, or even ticketed, but they, and the truck loaded with halibut, were stranded in Anacortes. The traffic stop stemmed from a running feud between fish buyers and Washington State Parks' Ranger Rick over the legalities of fish buying at the State Park boat launch at Cornet Bay--a full story in itself. This got us thinking about our calling.

The appeal of the fish business is multi-fold. First is the sheer sensual delight of the fish themselves. They are, almost uniformly, perfect. In their native habitat they move with infinite grace--one of our favorite family activities is to go watch the fishes swing through the observation windows at the Ballard Locks. Fishing is always a prayerful activity, you never know what will come up, fishing of any sort is an unfailing flirtation with destiny. Hooked, netting or trapped, they fight nobly but finally, generously, yield themselves. Once caught, the exterior of almost all fish varieties glisten with lovely colors and protective slime. They smell of a different world, and each has it's own distinct aroma--Halibut smell like mushroom-rotted forest duff. Chum salmon smell like cucumbers. Sockeye smell like all the promise and heartache of endless summer.

Fishes are entirely alien, but endlessly attractive to us land-bound fumblers. Biologically fish are a wonder, Salmon and many other fishes have lateral lines which function as sensory organs--flatfish have eyes on the same sides of their heads. Schooling fish like Mackerel and Sardine have the ability to literally bend light to confuse predators. The males of Ragfish and some other cartilaginous deepwater fishes do not eat after puberty--they lose their mouth and digestive systems and live for months or years on the accumulated reserves of their liver alone. Octopi learn faster than human children and can grow 2% per day, given ample food.

We can't do that.

To cut a fish is to examine the miracle of the universe embodied--that life endures, replicates and varies endlessly--all the while coming to the same point of delirious abundance . All digestive and vital organs can be removed without any meat contact. Each gut-sack is a further revelation--open a chum salmon and see a wash of small jellyfish flood out. Open a Coho salmon and see partially digested candlefish and herring. Open a sockeye and remove a fine paste of concentrated phytoplankton. Our inside halibut are stuffed with Spot Prawns and soft Dungeness Crab. Crack open bellies of our Eastern fishes for a glimpse of prey from a far-distant continental shelf--squid or butterfish--soft baby lobster.

Once filleted fish become translucent, pearlized with first contact to air. The flesh may be eaten raw or prepared further. Here again, the sensuality of fish flesh is overwhelming--to grill the first sockeye of the season, cooked bone-in with raspberries and rock salt, or to ceviche the Rhode Island Black Sea Bass with salt and lime, or steam Pink Scallops in their own liquor, to sit on a dock in October and crack a perfect, gravid, spine-waving urchin in the weak fall twilight, to crack and slurp a perfect, plump oyster, or to puree crab butter into a luscious crab soup--fish cookery and eating ranks among the greatest of life's physical pleasures. Oysters in the fall, scallops in winter, bottomfish in the spring and salmon in the summer, fishes are an unending, movable feast. A harvest furlough of any species only whets the appetite for delights ahead.

Plus it's brainfood.

Seafoods connect the generations as nothing else. The halibut we bring you are the exact fishes pursued by Washingtonians for millennia, the sockeye caught off Lopez are exactly the same as the ones pursued by hundreds of generations that have gone before us. Our shellfish beach is blessed with a huge shellfish midden and as we work, we grind underfoot shells remnant from thousand-year-old clam bakes. A life spent following the sea creates an independence and watchfulness not matched in any other profession. Food that is still subject to the vagaries of wind and tide is a powerful tonic--wild fishes will not be streamlined! To catch, hustle or purchase wild fish is to embrace the unknowable chaos--to accept the limits of human agency. Salt water mirrors the blood that runs through our veins and the saliva the wets our mouths--we are drawn to the great pulsing placenta of the planet from which we sprung, and drawn to the creatures we left behind those epochs ago. June Burn writes, "Does our heart remember sorrow as our blood remembers the sea?"

JFF Remembers the Swamp.

And in our dis-functional, excessively packaged, over-regulated, ram-rodded world, the wild fish business is the last untame-able, outlaw sector of the food world. Puget Sound tribal fisheries are the wildest and wooliest corner of a rasty industry. In this day and time you can (and F.O.G. almost has) be sent to jail for making a prosciutto or milking a cow. Spraying mud on the road from tractor tires is a federal offense and children under 16 are no longer allowed to work in their parent's businesses. And yet, all around us, as F.O.G. writes, men, women and children are casting prayerful hooks into our glorious, rock-bound and current charged waterways just as their ancestors did before. They are out fishing in 60' million dollar purse seine boats, flat-bowed river skiffs, half sunken relics from the age of wood and muscle. And a lucky and skillful fisher might catch a years' income worth of fish on one haul. Or enough skate to light up Seoul. And a scrappy, semi-solvent family farm can endrun the biggest muscle in the industry for a week here and a week there, once in a while. And a legitimate, bonded fish buyer sends out a commercial truck with $100,000 worth of product, a brand-new pickup truck, a scale, three men and no drivers licenses.

Neither of us in the founding generation here at Jones Ranch were born to the business. This is a life we chose and came to as immigrants. Early days on the water, here and in Alaska are etched on the memory like first love, the wild rush of freedom as the boat leaves harbor, the smells of the land as they roll across the water at twilight--the smells of rainforest rolling over Luck Pt, musky tundra at Egegik, sweet cottonwoods off Sinclair Island, the heft and authority of our first big catch on our own boat--the delirious joy of harvesting our own first oysters. And so we will always retain a joy of discovery that salts and sharpens the day-to-day pleasures of our calling. Our days will continue to change and evolve, our role within the tapestry will continue to develop, and the moments of triumph, diamond clarity and purpose will continue to propel us forward.

We're first generation.

So, F.O.G. drove the halibut home while the license-less three scuttled home via backroads bolt-holes. Since then F.O.G. has been glowing with the reflected glory of this beautiful thing that we call the seafood business. There's no business like fish business, there's no business I know.....

-- THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

Market Update/Fisheries Update, Chef's call to action.

Along with Halibut we welcome back Blackcod from Alaska and Neah Bay. Pricing is more or less as it's been. The Oregon Salmon Troll season opens April 8. Expect very limited supplies and high prices. The Puget Sound Crab season closed March 27th after a bangup year--almost 11 million pounds caught between the State and Tribes. Fishermen report phenomenal numbers of soft crab newly molted into harvest-legal size. We will begin to see tribal pop-openers here shortly, and so should be able to maintain a fairly steady flow of live, local crab. The Oregon, Washington and California Coasts continue to bang away, with reports of decent fishing.

Razor Sharp

In further F.O.G. news, we expect to begin selling live Razor Clams from Quinault this next week. Call for pricing and availability.

Razor Clam, Jackknife.

Eastern Fishes

As our fisheries are loosening up, so too are Eastern Fishes. Don't neglect to look East! Pricing is falling and availability is excellent on Monkfish, John Dory, Black Sea Bass and T&T with the occasional Conger Eel or flatfish thrown in for sauce.

Just as Special as in January, only cheaper now.

Pink Power Play.

In the ongoing saga of our attempts to bring Pink Scallops back to you, we have some fairly big news, and a request for help. As dedicated F.O.G. readers already know, we managed to get the Pink Scallop fishery re-opened after almost 20 years. Doing so took 6 years of tireless lobbying by us and Joe Stephens. Since the fishery was last open federal standards for harvest of shellfish have tightened dramatically. Yesterday F.O.G spoke with Jim Ranson, original pioneer of the scallop fishery 35 some years ago. Jim recollected that when he began the scallop harvest, he made one phone call to the Department of Health's Frank Cox, now retired, to ask about D.O.H. requirements for kicking off the scallop harvest. "Regular Testing" said Frank, "And I hope you make money" 35 years on, the bureaucratic thicket is almost impenetrable. Briefly, we may only harvest scallops in areas currently certified for shellfish. Once D.O.H. certifies an area, Fish and Wildlife must also open it. D.O.H. gave us an area on the north side of Orcas that happens to have very few scallops--the pinks are highly cyclical, with a very short life-cycle, and tend to boom and bust in any given area. The basin-wide populations are extremely healthy, in the 100,000,000#+ range. Just not in the area that we are allowed to harvest. D.O.H. is refusing to move with any speed to classify and certify new areas. Fish and Feathers is refusing to open currently certified areas around Lopez and Shaw that do have larger stocks. To date we have harvested only a few hundred pounds at a substantial financial loss to our divers and ourselves, given given how challenging harvest has been in the Northern district. Worse yet, our agency counterparts are using the poor landings thus far to claim that the pink scallop fishery is "non-viable", not biologically, but in harvest and market terms, to justify not moving, or moving slowly on certifying/opening more areas. We are desperately working to keep even small numbers of scallops moving to keep the fishery alive. We need your help! The state needs to hear that the scallop fishery is justified from a demand perspective, and they need to hear it from someone other than us.

We know the only thing wrong with this fishery is Washington State Bureaucracy. We know that you love the scallops. We know your customers love the scallops. We are panting for the day that we can fulfill demand on these wonderful creatures. We are applying all the pressure we can. Now, F.O.G needs your help. As some of the highest-profile chefs/restauranteurs in the state, you-all have a unique bully pulpit--you are the rockstars of the foodshed!! Please take a moment to review the attached draft letter, amend it as you wish and send it to the relevant big bosses. Please ask any friendly journalists to write up the struggle. Don't let a good thing die!!! THINK PINK!!!!!! Don't let the Bureaucrats Win!!!!

JFF Meats!!

While F.O.G. sings the praises of fish and fisheries near and far, back at Jones Ranch lurk some of the finest meats produced anywhere. Not only is meat a fine punctuation to a seafood-based diet, many meats have fish-friendly applications. Meat provides heft and balance to many seafood dishes. No turf, no surf. We are currently slaughtering Fine Island Lamb, Pork and Beef. We continue to connect with our fellow small farms to expand our meat selections.

It's important to keep the grass down.

Ring Of Fire, Inherit the Smolt.

Ash Now, Sockeye Later.

What we Hear

On March 27 Mt Pavof on the Alaska Peninsula began a fairly major eruption. Mainstream media focused on disruptions to airplane flight patterns and the risks to automobile paint for nearby residents. F.O.G. likes to dig a little deeper.

The Deeper Story

As we all know, the Alaska Peninsula, extending up to Bristol Bay, has the largest, most robust Sockeye Salmon runs in the world. Sockeye spend somewhere around a year as smolt in up-river lakes--meaning they can only thrive in certain river systems. South-Central Alaska is a geographical and hydrological paradise for sockeye, with just about every river of note having a significant lake upstream. Sockeye are plankton eaters, meaning they rely on primary biological productivity whether in fresh or salt water. A volcanic eruption slathering salmon-spawning streams and smolt-laden lakes sounds like a disaster, and the ash can surely smother fish in the moment, but as it turns out, volcanic ash also carries great concentrations of mineral fertilizers. The greatest example of this is the explosion of biological productivity, and ultimately, sockeye returns in Lake Becharof, following a massive eruption of the Ukinrek Maars, a pair of volcanic vents a mile South of Lake Becharof in 1977. Post-eruption, Lake Becharof was a mess, murky and mucky with caustic volcanic ash. Disaster was predicted for incoming salmon and the smolt then swimming in the lake. Instead, lake Becharof smolt survival and growth rates exploded, and a few years later adult returns did too. Egegik sockeye returns averaged 2,320,000 fish annually for the 20 years prior to the eruption and 9,100,000 annually for the twenty years following, or almost a 400% increase. Smolt survival per spawning female also exploded, and successful returns of adult fish from outgoing smolt also hit the highest levels ever recorded, anywhere. In 1987 almost 26 million adult fish returned to the Egegik river, with some age classes enjoying marine survival rates of over 50%--unprecedented in modern fisheries observation. To put those numbers in perspective, the Egegik River is roughly 28 miles long and has roughly equivalent flow rates to the Nooksack River back home in Whatcom County. Record sockeye production on the Fraser river was 34 million fish, in 1913. The Fraser is roughly 850 miles long, not counting tributaries, drains 85,000 square miles, and has a flow rate of 125,000 cubic feet/second, about 25 times the flow rate of the Egegik River. Even today, 39 years after the eruption, Egegik salmon production is still orders of magnitude higher than historic, pre-eruption levels. This history has been repeated with just about all the volcanoes in South-Western Alaska over the years. So while F.O.G. feels deeply for those whose flights were re-routed, we are extremely excited to watch Alaska Peninsula Sockeye runs flourish in the years ahead!

You're worried about the paint job???

Check out this spectacular photo album of the recent eruption;

http://www.ktuu.com/news/news/pavlof-eruption-alaska-village-covered-in-ash-20-flights-cancelled/38732402

We are, your dock-rumbling, fully licensed, founding family, rabble-rousing, pink persisting, ash spewing, news combing, JFF Crew.

Fish-O-Gram! Lent Supports Fish Consumption! Increase in Crab Quota! Halibut Countdown! Scallop Update! Fluke Frenzied RI Fishermen! Fresh Island Meats! Ask the Fishmonger!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 13:39:00 +0000

We aim to be fishers of chefs.

With all the hubbub over Chinese New Year and the dawning Year of the Monkey, we allowed Lent to begin unnoticed and unsung in the Fish-O-Gram. This week, we correct the oversight. Lent officially began this year on Ash Wednesday, February 10 and ends on Holy Thursday, March 24. During this time Catholics are strictly forbidden to eat meat on Fridays. Too, they are encouraged to give up specific foods and generally challenge themselves with prayer and abstentions. Years back Catholics were supposed to forego meat every Friday, not just during Lent. This changed in 1966, when Pope Paul VI issued a decree delegating responsibility for fasting schedules to national conferences of Bishops. Shortly thereafter Americas Bishops met and rescinded the requirement for year-round meatless Fridays, though they did ask that Catholics replace fish Fridays with some other form of penance. This sparked a years-long swoon in fish pricing. These facts are well known.

Less widely trumpeted is the importance of Rome-Mandated fish eating in developing global trade and settling the Americas. It is no accident that Christopher Columbus, an Italian/Portugese man sailing under the Spanish flag, was the one to discover the new world. Earlier Norse and Celtic visitors to the New World were also seeking fish, from Leif Erickson to John Cabot. As much as Gold and Glory, or Silk and Spice, Columbus was chasing fish, and he was doing so at the behest of his God and his Church.

Popular wisdom has it that the Catholic Hierarchy made a deal to boost fish sales centuries back--that meatless Fridays are another cheap deal from the golden age of Vatican corruption--This makes a great story but is untrue. Fish have been a staple of feasts since time began and have always represented elevated spiritual virtues--clean, stoic, free-swimming and removed from the muck and muddle of humanity, as opposed to the generally squalid lives of livestock raised side by side with the generally squalid lives of early-day farm-folk. Fish have much lower instances of deformities and parasites than livestock and wild game--mostly because underwater life is so consistently brutal that any sub-prime fish specimens are quickly eaten by something larger. It is well known fact of ethnology that fish-oriented cultures world wide have been cleaner and more culturally advanced than farming or hunter types--compare Northwest Coast Natives or the Japanese with the Mongols or Russian Peasants.

As the Christian church developed, fish were the obvious feasting/fasting food. Plus, Jesus himself made a distinct point of seeking out fisherfolk during his time here. Recently this connection has led many in the fishing industry to cast our ongoing political and regulatory struggles in biblical terms. Your Fish-O-Gram writer's first pickup truck had a "Jesus Was A Gillnetter" Bumper Sticker. This sentiment reached it's peak in 1996, during the battle against an initiative that would have banned commercial fishing in Washington State. Sanctified Seattle Gillnetter John Macdonald called into a Christian sport fishing radio program to declare that "Jesus would rip your head off" to anyone who voting to put the fishermen out of work. I-640 went down in flames, 20 years later we are still fishing and the misguided, anti-fishing forces have been left to repent at leisure--no heads have been ripped off. Mercy in action.

Words to live by

Fish represent both a Penance and a Good Work-- eating fish is good as a negative--eating fish means not eating meat, a sacrifice, and a positive--eating fish is a virtue, in and of itself, like charity and piety. As of 1000 AD, more or less, Meatless Fridays became a requirement for the faithful--eating meat on Friday was considered a mortal sin on par with adultery and gossip-mongering. This presented real problems for those not lucky enough to live on a coast. Satisfying land-locked Catholics required a well-oiled trade in some form of preserved fish. As discussed in a previous Fish-O-Gram, the church allowed for some artful end-runs for those in places too far removed from trade routes, most notably dispensation for Conquistadors to eat Capibara and Beaver in lieu of fish. Fish do not preserve equally--the stand-out fish for preservation regard is Cod. Cod is not found in any real numbers near the southern Catholic population centers, so an extensive trade route developed to tie Cod-producing northern regions to Cod-consuming Southern regions. More often than not the return leg of the trip carried alcohol from the vineyards and distilleries of Central and Southern Europe. Traders off-loading salt cod in Portugal filled their holds with the cheapest, nastiest rotgut they could find for the return voyage. By the time the ship returned to Norway, Iceland or the Faroes, months of agitation inside oak casks had mellowed and improved the liquor through aeration and oxidation of the volatiles. Grateful Nordic fishermen flavored the spirits with moss, reindeer droppings and botanicals and drank themselves stupid. Fish trade, driven by the Catholic church, led to phenomenal improvements in transportation, navigation and logistics technology, not to mention Nordic alcoholism. These advances, and the ongoing search for fish-rich grounds led directly to the discovery and colonization of the New World.

It'll be there by Friday.

While Catholics represent just 1/4 of the JFF crew, we love Pope Francis. These blustery, long last weeks of winter are a perfect time to reflect on god and man, the nature of life and our place in the world. We like to think there is room within the Fish-O-Gram format for more than just the tawdry nuts and bolts of protein commerce.

This years' Lent message from the Pope is "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” This seems a valuable thought for all, regardless of denomination. And if focusing on fish helps sweeten the soul and concentrate the mind, so much the better.

JFF Salutes Pope Francis!

A man for all Seasons.

Local Fisheries Updates

March 19th- Livin' the dream!

Tribal Halibut continues to be scheduled for March 19. We have begun securing bait and locking down arrangements with our fisher friends. Big Fun!!! Also, happily, we have also secured a bottomless market for skate wings. Skate come in along with the halibut in huge numbers--last year our primary folks at Lummi got 20,000+# and we, frankly, were swamped. Seems the skate market in Korea is red hot right now and we've got a container to fill. Moving Skate is slimy, caustic and nasty--but it represents fuel money for the guys and is part of our service as fish buyers. So, here's skating clean, all the way to Seoul! Halibut will be available in Seattle beginning the morning of the 20th, weather permitting. ORDER NOW!!!!! Remember, our San Juans Halibut are the best in the world, cradled in North America's beauty spot, raised on a steady diet of Spot Prawns and soft Dungeness Crab. Don't get stuck with the inferior Alaska or Coastal product, Call Paisley now! Two years ago Elliots got a 240# halibut caught by Ilya Joy of Lummi. There are monsters down there!

The Lummi Nation went fishing and all we got was this creepy skate.

Dungeness Crab

Continuing the general upward swing of our in-sound fisheries, WDFW just bumped the Puget Sound Crab Quota by 180,000#, split between tribes and state fishers. This is on top of the already allocated and harvested 5,000,000#. A trickle of beautiful, hard-shelled crab come in daily. Fishers report their traps are stuffed with huge numbers of soft-shelled crabs just coming into legal harvest size. So we have abundant hard crab for another six weeks or so, though the price is getting a little stiff. And next summer for the sport and tribal fisheries should be as good or better than last years' superlative fishing. Come visit for a crab-themed Island get-away!

Pink Scallop Update--Department of New Horizons

Last week was the best weather week of the 2016 so far. We had high hopes, but our divers did not make it out. Divers are the sauciers of the fisheries world and we are finding that we have zero control over their behavior. As those lucky few of you who got teaser bags of scallops may have noticed, we have jumped the price to you so as to sweeten the price to the divers. Our hope was that a higher price would be a nice carrot for the divers, but it seems we need a bigger stick of some kind. And now the weather has turned, so we are least a few days out from any serious attempts for scallops. Joe Stephens, our superstar dive master, is on the prowl for more divers. Diving is the perfect job for water-loving urban refugees. If you are tired of the Seattle culinary bump-and-grind, consider trading your apron and knives for a wetsuit and butterfly net. No tipping--pay is by the pound. Joe will train! Celebrity Chefs welcome to apply!

With your help pink scallops will become a regular, week by week product.

It's better down here.

Land Ho!

Excellent Fresh Meats are rolling out from the knife-wielding wizards at Link Lab. Call Paisley or Sara to build a fresh meats program for your needs. We have regular supplies of Lopez Lamb, Lopez Pork and Lopez and Skagit Beef.

All meats are from Jones Ranch or specified, equivalent producers. Come see the magic happen at Link Lab. The LL boys are on fire! Go Jerry! Go Jesse!

Remember, the difference is in the Grass and in the Cutting.

Give Me Fluke or Give Me Beer.

Attentive Fish-O-Gram readers will have noticed a tapering in Eastern fish abundance and variety these past weeks. This is because the Rhode Island Fluke season is in full tilt and Pt Judith fishermen are in full blown Fluke Frenzy. Everything else has fallen by the wayside, laundry is piling up and huge volumes of fluke are making their flatfish way to markets near and far. That said, we do have Monk, T&T, John Dory and Black Sea Bass coming in for the end of the week. Call Paisley. Oh, and if anyone wants some, Fluke is extremely available. On the East Coast Fluke are considered a prime animal--often used for sushi.

Why Doesn't Seattle Love Fluke?

Chef Call-In Corner

The most common questions we field are about fish freshness. You, our customer base, demand the best, and it is our delight to provide you the best. What the best means though, is a rolling notion, particularly when it comes to fish freshness. For many of you, the below information will be old hat. But it needs to be written.

One fish, fresh fish, firm fish, blue fish.

When it comes to freshness, the fish-by fish variations can be devilishly complex. Not all fish are created equal, even within species, and any natural attributes of the fish can be mitigated or compounded by harvest type and handling. The primary variables impacting fish freshness are fish variety, harvest methods and post-harvest handling.

Hot Belly/Cool Belly

As with any living organism, guts, blood, slime and organs will deteriorate much faster than flesh. Predatory fish, midwater fish, being high-metabolism, as opposed to herbivorous fish or low-metabolism bottom-dwelling fish, suffer with the rapid breakdown of prey fish in their bellies. The principle is exactly like a compost pile--flesh in a digestive tract is "hot" and greenery is "cool". A hot digestive tract can burn through the intestinal lining and begin to degrade belly flesh within a few hours after a fish dies. Belly burned fish will have discolored belly meat and dissolved pinbones. In extreme cases, the entire belly can be ruined. Ice slows the process down, but does not stop it. The best thing for hot bellied fishes is immediate gutting and ideally bleeding as well. Degree of chilling is also all important. The closer to freezing the fish gets, the better it will hold up. Most fisheries ice is made with salt to lower the ice temperature. A little salt in the ice also help to draw out slime, which is highly volatile.

Smaller and midwater fishes tend to have short shelf-lives. Small oily fish, like sardines and mackerel and squid, have very short shelf lives. This is why so much of these fishes are frozen. An issue with small "wetfish" (sardines, squid, etc) is that they are too small to efficiently gut on board and so, regardless of icing, they generally need to be prepared within a week of harvest.

Salmon tips

Coho salmon is the most volatile salmon, followed by King. That is a major part of why these fish have traditionally been caught by trollers--there is no particular magic in line catching fish--actually, line playing a fish can release large amounts of lactic acid in the flesh. Trollers catch fish in small enough volume to bleed and gut them immediately after harvest. Nowadays progressive trollers slip a charged catheter tube onto fish livers and flush blood out of the entire fish. Sockeye, by contrast, as herbivores, can sit for extended periods with their guts in with no degradation of the fish. This is why gillnet caught sockeye is the best sockeye there is--gillnets are a nice, gentle way to die, and while it is always better to gut fish right away, it doesn't absolutely need to be done. Gillnetters who bleed and dress fish in the Troll fashion produce some of the finest salmon, of all species, of anyone on the water. In any case, the quality of handling from harvest onward is much more important than chronological age. Trollers routinely fish for up to ten days between deliveries. As long as the fish have been fully cleaned, amply iced and lovingly handled, there is no problem with shooting ten day old fish into the supply chain. They will remain premium for at least another ten days. Summertime on the rivers here the tribal fishery generally goes forth with minimal ice and rough handling. A river king salmon tossed in an open skiff, not iced and not dressed, may be inedible within a few hours, while we would have no problem recommending a 20 day old troll king. The other variable is proximity to spawning grounds and diet--again, an ocean-caught salmon will be flawless and can hold up much longer in transport, while an inshore-caught fish is more likely to be already degraded as it prepares itself for spawning. Purse Seine caught salmon tends to be the softest, based on the violence of the harvest and the volumes typically caught at one time.

Bottoms Up

Most bottom fish tend to hold up fairly well. This is partially a function of their slower metabolism. Here again, harvest method is critical, with drag-caught fish getting scuffed up before hitting a boat deck. We do our best to not source drag-caught fish for this reason. Hook and line or pot caught is better, especially for higher value species like black cod, pacific cod and monkfish, as these are gutted onboard. Our Rhode Island Friends also catch some bottomfish in fish traps and this fish has proven to be uniformly excellent. Rhode Islands fishers also use gillnets for some bottom species. This is how most of the monk and dory is caught. Again, gillnets are gentle, and the high value of these fishes means post-harvest handling is excellent. This does vary widely by species. One common Eastern flatfish used to be known as the Baptist Flounder, always thrown back because it invariably goes bad shortly after coming out of the water. For the most part fishes that are transported long distance or held for extended times are fishes that can hold up to this. Fishes that cannot are frozen or rendered.

Age can be a good thing.

Some fish, like Halibut, actually improves as with age. The old-time schoonermen would make 20-40 day trips from Seattle to the Bering Sea for fresh halibut. Fishing would commence and fish would be layered, with ice, until the holds were full. Upon unloading, returning crewmen considered the earliest, lowest fish in the holds to be the premium fish for homepack. Aged halibut develops a wonderful round, buttery flavor. My first season in Alaska we forgot about a half-halibut in a side hatch for three weeks. When rediscovered the fish had turned yellowish and had plumped up from the salt and ice. It had a strong, but not unpleasant aroma, kind of like a mellow hard cheese. Cooked it was delicious, vastly superior to the sqeaky-fresh fletch we had cooked the night we caught it. Salmon is the same, though the squeakyness of too-fresh salmon fades much more rapidly. Sturgeon and some varieties of Eel don't even stop twitching for 3-4 days post harvest. During this time they are literally inedible, assuming you can even pin one down to cut it.

I'll take the one on the bottom.

The Supply chain is What it is.

Barring truly heroic efforts or a great stroke of luck, fish doesn't come much fresher than 5 days or a week old. Between the ups and downs of weather, timelines of fishing, shore handling and the world of logistics, this is just the way things are. When we have fresher fish, we heavily advertise that fact. Even there, farm fish is generally at least a week old, based on processing and transportation limitations. Most fish in grocery stores is at least ten days old. This should not be a problem if the fish has been well handled, and should allow for 5-6 days in a customer's home. Some fresh fishes like sardines move on a more streamlined basis because they have to. This is one reason fresh wetfish rarely turns up on retail counters.

Shellfish Guide.Shellfish are a giant exception to these guidelines. When it comes to shellfish, the fresher the better. This is why we pull shellfish fresh from the water early mornings on delivery days, not from a warehouse. Accept no substitutes!

It's Not the Days on the Fish, it's the Bruises, Hands and Temperature. Our Campaign Promise.

Fish should look good, smell good and be free of bruises and blood. If those conditions apply, age is pretty much irrelevant. Unlike many distributors, we will always tell you what we know about fish origins. Dealing with variable aged-product is an inherent part of working with wild fisheries. We ask that you evaluate the fish on it's merits rather than chronological age. Also we encourage all of you to put some of the local halibut aside, nice and cold, for 3-4 weeks as culinary experiment. It will have the properties of a finely aged steak, only better, because it is fish.

We are, your finely aged, only mildly bruised, JFF Crew.

Tell it like it is.

Fish-O-Gram! Duck Luck! Chef Sweepstakes! Pink Letter Week!! Fresh Island Meats! Sunchokes! New Email & Fish Doldrums...... Halibut Countdown!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 19:49:00 +0000

If you have missed your scheduled, Friday, Sat, Sunday Fish-O-Gram, you are correct. It is tardy. Your dedicated Fish-O-Gram writer has been otherwise occupied, with the eye strain to prove it, hunched over over a tote full of geoducks trying to induce them to spawn. No dice thus far, the males are willing, but the females just aren't performing. But if it means anything, I have missed you terribly.

I'd rather be writing a Fish-O-Gram

Also, this week, we have transferred from Outlook to Gmail. We hated Outlook, and now we are learning to hate Gmail. A week of free fish to the customer who turns us on to an e-mail system that functions and does what we want it to, and finds us an accounting program that doesn't turn evil and try to control us from the computer monitor. Your e-mails are still coming in, and we remain attentive. Please bear with us through the transition. Please note all of the old addresses still work, but to reach Ivan directly email "ivan@jffarms.com" and to email Paisley directly write to "sales@jffarms.com". Nick & Sara's email remains the same as does Logistics & Office.

Family Time

For those of you who have never spanked off a duck, the process involves alternately exposing the ducks to water temperatures of 10 and 16 degrees centigrade, bombarding them with food, oscillating PH between 7.8 and 8.9, leaving them dry for extended periods to concentrate their minds and spending endless hours with a flashlight, trying to detect the first curls of sperm or eggs ejaculating from their siphons. At a certain point of desperation we pick out a particularly un-co-operative duck, slice it open and mash up the gonads to swirl in the water with the other ducks, pour encourager les autres. When they begin to spew, we hustle the lucky, lusty duck to a private bucket to work things out, then mingle sperm and eggs at a specific ratio in another bucket. Once the cells begin to divide, we put eggs in a 1500 liter tank to complete the process. In four hours the resultant larvae is swimming, in 24 hours it has a shell.

If this sounds awful, it is, but also quite miraculous. In season, which begins now, we are spawning something, ducks, oyster or clams, at least once every two weeks. We encourage any and all of you to schedule a farm visit around spawning time. Together, we will create life.

Family Fun.

Pink Peril.

Pink Scallops are now a reality. This past Saturday Eric Donnelly served the first public scallops in almost 20 years at the POP event. Go Eric! Go Scallops! Our dream is becoming a reality!!!!!!!!! This week we have a very limited quantity of live pink scallops for sale. Next week will be more abundant. Hooray for the divers, Hooray for legislators Kristine Lytton, Doug Erickson, Brian Blake, hooray for you, lucky pioneer chefs! Countless hours of slogging through mindless bureaucracy, redeemed! Call Paisley! Order restrictions will apply.

Pink Scallops, Limited Supply

Department of Radial thinking.

The Pink fishery is a great triumph, but it bears pointing out the degree to which our food system is controlled by unaccountable, out-of-touch bureaucracy. In our opinion, government control bears a great deal of blame for the sorry state of the American food system. It is part of our mission at JFF to expose the iron fist beneath the neoprene glove and work to free food for the people. The ongoing food revolution demands no less. Today Pink Scallops, next stop legal cultivation/sale of seaweed in Washington State. One clam, one vote.

I'd rather be spanking off Dux.

Seafood and Bespoke Fresh Meats--Confrontation Therapy.
This week we have whole/half hogs, lamb and fresh Lopez beef cut to your specifications. It is our ongoing contention that meat deserves the same consideration that seafood receives--namely, appreciation of subtle distinctions of location, season, breed and flavor. For those of you who demand source-specified shellfish, proudly sing the river origin of your salmon, require that bottomfish be hook-and-line caught--all rightly so--why are meats exempt from this equation? We aim to supply you with meats to match our seafood, grown by ourselves or other equivalent producers. Yes, big label, greenwashed meats are cheaper. But so is mushy, drag caught black cod from Pacific Seafoods. Would you serve that? Would your customers support it? If so, please alert us, and we will take you off the Fish-O-Gram list. Think about it.

But I'm the low price supplier.....I'm a broadliner....

JFF is here to help. Weekly supplies of Island Lamb, Pork and beef from our farm or the Mainland Cattle Company. Move away from the darkness. Embrace the Grass. Call Paisley! Call Sara!

Garden Corner.

The Jones Boys have decided to work towards a family trip to Madagascar, partially to see a Mouse Lemur in person and partially in hopes of seeing an Omuras Whale, a species of tropical waters Baleen whale, discovered only 10 years ago. The tropical Baleen thing is significant because warmer waters tend to be lacking in krill and other baleen-worthy prey. Omuras Whales are either uniquely efficient or know something marine biologists do not.

To finance this trip they have set to make the Jones Ranch kitchen garden a commercial Venture. Being protein oriented, we have long held that Shrubbery is Garnish, but in the interest of good parenting and the prospect of a Madagascar Vacation, we now embrace produce. All proceeds go to the Jones Boys Madagascar Fund.

First harvest is over-wintered Sunchokes. We have very abundant supplies. $4.00# Please call.

Help us live the dream.

Fish Update.

Fresh Fish remains....fairly static. The Quinalt river has blown out with all this rain, so Steelhead is touch-and-go right now and our Rhode Island friends are hard-pressed with nasty weather. Local bottomfish is fairly available, crab pricing remains as it has been, but on the whole not much is happening, except for Pink Scallops. But what an exception! Later in the week we will have Black Seabass and Dirty Squid. The fresh RI Ling is also something special. Eastern Ling is kind of like a midget cod. Very delicious. Lemon Sole is also wonderful and priced right. Fresh from the bay, guaranteed unspanked, Jamestown tidelands geoducks are also available, Call Paisley 24/7. After midnight, if she doesn't pick up, just keep calling!

Halibut Looms

We are now on the Four-week countdown to the opening of the halibut season. We will be delivering the first halibut of the season to Seattle Sunday the 20th, weather permitting, and again, daily throughout the week. Again, San Juans Halibut has a flavor and flesh quality not found in fish from other areas, including the Washington Coast. Our unique combination of big, fast water and warm, shallow bays yield fish that are tender, rich and flavorful. Last year, while gutting Halibut, the most common food we found in Halibut bellies was Spot Prawns. With a diet like that, it's a no-brainer why Islands halibut are the best in the world, bar none. Place your orders now! Don't flounder around, ring in the Halibut New Year with the flatfish highpoint of the year. If you would like to offer your customers just a little bit more, trained JFF staff is available for Halibut-centric events, we have props, costumes and more. Call Paisley to schedule your Halibut Hootenanny.

We can do balloon animals too

We are, belatedly, your devoted JFF Crew.

Fish-O-Gram! Mission Revision!! Pink Progress! Jones Boys Scallop Shwag!! Nordic Culinary Innovations! Fishes on a Steady Roll!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 16:01:00 +0000

Firstly, thanks to one and all for a tremendous Valentines week. We hope that you turned all the JFF product into happy customers and bulging registers. For us early February feels like a great milestone--days are lengthening, fish abundance an variety is growing, algae is beginning to boom in our lagoon, and consequently oysters beginning to grow, livestock is beginning to reproduce, the garden is starting to come out of dormancy and sales are picking up with the turn of season. This year we are also marking a number of changes in our staff and internal organization. So the dawning of the year of the Monkey is a real thing at Jones Ranch, and we aim to mark it in style.

Ancient History

JFF is now 14 years old, sprung out of the union of Nick, seafood and fish oriented, chaos--loving west Coaster and Sara, farm, livestock and organizationally--minded offshoot of Cuba, New York and the Empire State Dairy industry. Over the years we have been many things and grown into many roles, lumber brokers, commercial fisher-folk, cattle farmers, hog farmers, shellfish growers, tendermen, fish brokers, caterers, parents, parents, again and again, geoduck seed producers, delivery drivers, plumbers, fence builders, serial committee members, sawyers, and more. And over this time we have grown to include a rolling assortment of helpers at all levels of the business. For 12 unbroken years we parlayed our lurching, universalist--protein creed into sway over a major chunk of the productive resources of our home island, a good slice of San Juan County locavore business, and a sliver of the booming Seattle restaurant market. Every year was better and more expansive than the one before and every year we added more and different activities, pursuits and staff. The sequence seemed logical at the time--when shellfish seed became scarce, we started a hatchery. When we found that we could not rely on other providers to cut meat, we bought Link Lab as a Seattle meat cutting beachhead.

Jones Farm before the fire.

2 Years Marks the Spot

Two years ago our long and winding winning streak took a serious detour. On April 24, 2014, our home, office and packing shed burnt to the ground, caused by an electric short in antiquated wiring. Following that, our geoduck seed crop, typically our largest source of annual income, failed. We moved back into a drafty, moldy house on the property and began an ongoing, pitched battle with our insurance company and started rebuilding. Our business structure and employee group were largely left on autopilot, and JFF, as an entity, began to drift.

18 Months in the Wilderness
Drift leads inevitably to atrophy and, in our case, years of rapid growth had created a shaky foundation that required constant inputs from us personally and required continual revenue growth. Following the initial shocks, and aftershocks and aftershocks beyond, various of our activities began to implode, most notably the shellfish hatchery--a highly risky venture at the best of times. Sales and distribution continued, but on a flat trajectory while we spent our time on various forms of crisis management. What had come fairly naturally and easily now needed to be rebuilt and re-imagined with our blood, sweat and tears, with marrow from our bones. We sincerely thank all our customers, suppliers, employees and investors who stuck with us through this time.

Clawbacks are hell

If At First You Don't Succeed........

So, over the course of a few short months we found ourselves knocked flat and thrashing. In order to rebuild we knew that we needed to double down on the reasons we started down this path in the first place, namely focusing on products only we can produce. Beginning late summer 2015 things began to turn. First was successful hatchery production of a gigantic crop of European Flat Oyster seed. European Flats are perhaps the most storied oyster in the world--from Emperor Nero to MFK Fisher gourmands have sought out the flats. Due to a chain of adverse regulatory decisions, we are and will remain the only producers of European Flats on the West Coast. In November WDFW finally agreed, after 6 years of pushing, to allow a dive fishery on Pink Scallops. In December we began bringing premium Rhode Island fishes to Seattle.

Building Momentum
A major Seattle sales push and a very lucky sales manager find in Paisley Madison, coupled with the explosive growth of the restaurant industry, has pushed us farther and deeper into that world than ever before. Now, for the first time in almost two years, we are able to see far enough out of the weeds to begin steering ourselves again. It seems an opportune moment to remind ourselves and you, of what, exactly, it is that we aim to achieve.   So we dusted off our whiteboard, poured a few rounds of whiskey, and cloistered the JFF executive committee to come up with a revised mission statement. Here goes:

JFF Mission Statement
Our mission is to produce, source and distribute the finest quality specialty proteins in the world and share them with customers who share our passion.

We are blessed to live in a corner of the world that naturally produces superlative product. We focus on systems and partnerships to maximize these natural endowments. We especially focus on product that others can not or do not produce. Outside of our production scope, we partner with like-minded producers to bring in the best, most sustainable, most unique seafoods from elsewhere.

Our customers are our partners and our friends. We select our customers as carefully as we select our partners and suppliers. We are blessed to work with an group of extraordinary customers. We salute your dedication, creativity and passion.
We are fully invested in our customers' success and will do anything in our power to accommodate, promote and partner with you.
Our business will grow organically as we grow our community of like-minded customers and suppliers. We will not compromise our sourcing or standards in order to pursue growth.
Our business is our life. If it ain't fun, we don't do it. If we can't do it special, we don't do it. If folks aren't fun to work with, we leave them alone. We aim to remain small enough to pick and choose our projects, products, employees and customers.

JFF and You
So there you have it. We cannot promise to be perfect, we cannot iron out all the supply kinks inherent in fresh proteins. We can, however, promise to work with you, grow with you and continually labor to bring you the best list of source-specified, specialty fishes, seafood and meats in the business. Looking forward, we have endless projects brewing, from ironing out the last kinks in the Pink Scallop harvest, local Halibut coming in 5 short weeks, to a re-release of European Flats coming in two months or so, to more specialty oysters ahead, to actualizing a steady supply of fresh, west-side origin meats, to expanding into specialty greenery, to future sales/distribution collaborations with Owen Roe Winery, Westcott Bay Ciderworks and San Juan Island Distillery. We love this business and we love you!

The Monkey Speaks His Mind
To celebrate the now arrived Year of the Monkey, to celebrate the upcoming election year, and to celebrate our re-focused state, we direct you to the link below, one of our favorite musicians, Dave Bartholomew, performing an original composition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjuxtjtuWg

Dave Bartholomew - The Monkey

www.youtube.com

The Monkey Speaks his Mind, from 1957

Pink Progress!!!

We saw the first real motion on Pink Scallops last week. Superstar Dive Master Joe Stephens took advantage of the break in the weather and found the first substantial populations of pinks in the area we have been given. A small handful are currently testing the scallop holding tank system at Jones Ranch. And the scallops are, in fact, everything we remembered them being. Further, WADOH is showing signs of being more flexible on certifying new areas. We are not yet to the Promised Land, but we are making steady progress. Look for more in the week ahead! Meanwhile, enjoy the following images and the video of swimming, or singing, scallops. Very winning.

20 years late but worth the wait.

Scallops and Bone China

Merchandising Dept.
Once the scallops are eaten, the issue becomes what to do with the shells. In an earlier, less enlightened era, the answer would have been ashtrays. With a little clever embroidery they could surely serve as shower curtain, privacy screen or cape ornaments. Roach clips, tree ornaments, angels and air freshener holders are other popular choices.

Some people have too much time on their hands.

The Jones Boys have come up with a solution that doesn't involve hot glue guns or costly metal hardware. Moreover, it allows us, and you, to wear on our sleeves, our excitement for the return of the pinks!! Let everyone know you THINK PINK!!!!

Scallop Pinks!!

Scallop shwag available at deepwaterdawgz.com.

Chefs Corner

We have watched and applauded the Nordic Culinary revolution for years. After all, a cuisine based on seafood, seasonal herbage and lean, gamy meats is perfectly suited to our northern biome. Nick's (Russian origin) extended family spent decades in Finland and Sweden after the Russian revolution. Too, we have worked and consorted for years with Nordic Peoples in and around the seafood industry. Nordics are a highly effective race, and we salute them.

So it was with some interest that we read of a seafood industry-relevant archaeological find in Northern Sweden.

A well defined fish fermentation site was found in the 9,200 year-old settlement of Blekinge, Sweden. In this pre-trade route, pre-ceramics era, fish was fermented with pine bark and seal fat, then wrapped in uncured seal and wild boar hides and buried in pits. Be the first to feature true, Ur-Nordic fermented fish!! We have about 20,000# of frozen chum we would let go cheap for experimentation, as well as a steady supply of uncured pig skins.

https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/200,000-fish-bones-suggest-ancient-scandinavian-people-were-more-complex-than-though

Fishes Ahead, Fishes Behind. Meats Too.

Fish abundance and variety is building with the season. Our Rhode Island friends are enjoying the first lengthy weather break for quite some time. We expect a full range of Eastern fishes this coming week, and reasonable pricing. Local fishes are decently available for this week, including Rock, Dover, Petrale, Truecod, Cali-Hali and Alaska Troll Kings. Beef Pork and Lamb. Available as wholes, halves and in cuts.

Signed,
Your Loyal JFF Crew

Fish-O-Gram! Sushi Superbowl! Valentines Looms! Happy Opening, Noroeste! Deepwater Struggles! Farm Meats on Parade! Yellowtail Amberjack!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 13:29:00 +0000

Dear Statistics-Minded Customers,

Over the years much has been written about the "Superbowl Effect" on everything from the Stock-Market, to the San Francisco homeless population. Today, we would like to draw your attention to a lesser known, but deeply troubling phenomenon and suggest some strategies for the future.

No fish, no shrimp, even natural meats are underrepresented.

Super Sunday is not Seafood Sunday

The Superbowl marks the second largest food consumption day of the year. Unlike other food-centric holidays, however, the love does not spread to your friends in the seafood business. On the homefront, one might expect this to be different. The Seahawks are named for the Thunderbird, a giant raptor, whale eating bird in tribal lore stretching from Alaska. Thunderbirds, or Seahawks, do not eat snack foods, they eat marine mammals and, in a pinch, humans. Some fringe ethnographers have suggested that Thunderbird traditions stem from deep historical encounters with a remaindered population of Pterosaurs, or latter day flying dinosaurs based on remarkably similar native legends hemisphere wide and cliff paintings depicting giant air-borne lizards. Others suggest that Thunderbirds still roam isolated pockets of North America. In any event, Thunderbirds are definitely sea-to-table and nose-to-tail diners.

The magic of the Internet. Completely authentic photo of Thunderbird brought to ground.

Thunderbird, or Seahawk, dietary preferences notwithstanding, the past two years, hometown pride in the Seahawks put a major crimp in seafood sales. This year, with no local dog in the fight, fish sales were up 60%. How about that?

A Practical Suggestion;

Whale meat is out, and whole animal preparation is probably too much to ask on such a busy day. Finger food being the thing, JFF hereby proposes a Sushi Superbowl movement for next year. In 51 short weeks look for sushi-fish special offers and other Superbowl themed specialty proteins. Let's make next year a Sushi, Seahawk, Superbowl Sunday.

Think about it

Forward to Valentines Day!!

Fortunately, joy inevitably follows sorrow. Valentines day is an extremely fishy holiday, and we have your number! Call Paisley! Call Ivan!

Green urchin quota remains but they are beginning to spawn. Diver Chris says we may seem some improvement towards March, but for the time being Urchins are off the docket.

Highlights for the week will be a full range of Rhode Island fishes and fresh Yellowtail Amberjack. Yellowtail is the wild form of Hamachi--Japanese fish farmers capture millions of Yellowtail fry annually and raise them in pens. This yields the soft buttery flesh we all know and love. Yellowtail Amberjack represents the ones who got away. Expect a leaner, more toothsome and flavorful animal. We love Amberjack! Small volumes of fresh Oregon dragger-caught blackcod are beginning to trickle in, but delivery of these is always subject to quality control. Plus we still have a handful of spot prawns and always, always, frozen giant Octo.

Noroeste Opening!

This evening we will be attending opening ceremonies at Noroeste Seattle. We are giddy with excitement--Noroeste combines one of our favorite restaurateurs with one of the most passionate chefs we have ever worked with. These past months Shannon been hounding us for unique and wonderful proteins and been holed up in the back of Quality Athletics, putting the polish on what promises to be a groundbreaking take on traditional taqueria recipes. Shannon's purchasing choices, creativity and attention to detail make it clear that Noroeste is going to be something truly special in a city of superlative restaurants.

Go Shannon! Go Rachel! Go Josh!

Deep water blues--all pinked-up and nowhere to go

Between weather, boat problems and trying to find concentrations of scallops, pink scallops are getting off to a slow start. It has been 20 years since divers seriously pursued these fluttering little culinary treasures and the re-learning curve has been steep. At the depths scallops lurk, divers get very short times on bottom, so prospecting is time consuming and challenging. Also, the prime scallop areas are not currently open for harvest. So, stay tuned. This has been slower than we would have liked, but just like the Tree Lobster, JFF never gives up!

It hasn't been easy.

Department of Culinary Collaborations.

One of the biggest Challenges for small farmers and local-minded chefs is maintaining a steady supply of fresh, local meats. Between the vagaries of animal growth rates, supply line constraints and the ever-swirling nightmare that is the USDA, consistent fresh local meats are the rarest of things on the culinary stage. During our time in the business we have seen most farmers give up on restaurant sales of fresh meat, and the best-willed chefs give up in desperation and go with "green washed" meat labels.

JFF, in consultation with Link Lab, has been working for years to stage ourselves to get serious about supplying fresh meats from our and other allied farms to restaurants. We are now ready and rolling. Please contact Paisley or Sara for ordering and availability information. We have, in a seamless flow from the Hoof to the Hook, Pastured Lopez Pork, Luscious Lopez Lamb and fine Sedro Wooley Cattle from the Mainland Cattle Company, all available in wholes, halves and cuts. Remember, we are working with small numbers of critters, 40# per week of hanger steaks is not going to happen.

21st Century Management Corner

The master butchers at Link Lab are now offering whole animal butchery classes for teambuilding and skills building. Bring your own carcass or use one of ours! Classes may be scheduled for evenings, weekends or off days. Call Paisley to schedule your Team Time at Link Lab.

Shared experiences make us stronger.

Sincerely, your JFF Team!

Call or e-mail today!

Paisley, (425) 577-2329, sales@jffarms.com, Ivan, (360)298-2781 orders@jffarms.com.

Fish-O-Gram! Halibut Season Set! Weatherbound Scallops! Harbingers of Spring! Carcasses Hit the Street! Year of the Monkey Dawns! New Reps System at Jones Ranch

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 20:48:00 +0000

Dear Weather Stymied, Nettle Eating, but still Pink-Hued Customers,

A long, tempestuous week blew our diver friends off the water. It was a disappointing start to the Pink Scallop season--so sad. But the winds have died down and we are looking at Sunday for sample collections and Tuesday for a commencement of commercial harvest.

Scallops live at such depths that harvest diving is dicey and challenging, as with any wild fishery, we are endlessly subject to vagaries of the weather. As reflected last week, developing this fishery will take a great deal of time and experimentation. Please bear with us as we work to Bring Back the Pinks!

Department of Fisheries Management

Yesterday the International Pacific Halibut Commission wrapped up their annual meeting in Anchorage. For those with the inclination to dig a little deeper, there are some fascinating statistics on Halibut sizing over time on their website http://www.iphc.int/news-releases.html.

But more to the point, the 2016 kick-off to the halibut season has been announced for March 19 and the quota for our region has been raised by 20%. This means that our local flatfish are thriving and stocks are growing, and it means more availability for you of the San Juans Halibut, the greatest halibut in the world!

This tribal-only fishery kicks off on halibut opening day, March 19th and our plucky Lummi, Swinomish, Tulalip and Jamestown friends will convert their crab skiffs to longliners for two, three or on a good year, four openings to pursue these massive flatfish. San Juans Halibut have shorter muscle fibers than the Alaska variant, higher fat levels and a more subtle, richer and rounder flavor. They are simply the best. And, the past few years, these early fish have been the most reasonably priced of the season.

March 19. Be ready

Winter's Almost Gone
Last night at Jones Ranch, we had our first round of Nettle pesto and nettle tea. The grass is growing, buds are swelling and calves are on the ground. We are on the home-stretch!
And fresh fish is beginning to loosen up as well. Rhode Island production looks good for the week ahead and we have a reasonable basket of fresh locals as well.
We still have green urchins available, crab pricing is still reasonable, and as of Monday we will have...

#1 60 up TUNA
#2 TUNA
ALBACORE
SWORD
MAHI
1-2 TAI SNAPPERS
GROPER
BRANZINI
ONO
OPAH
BLUE MARLIN
ESCOLAR
8+ CALIFORNIA HALIBUT

FRESH FISH-DOMESTICS
TRUE COD FILLET
LING COD
DOVER FILLET
ROCK FILLETS
PETRALE FILLETS



FARMED STURGEON
STEELHEAD, U9, G&
STEELHEAD, 9+, G&G
FRESH & LIVE SEAFOOD *ALL LIVE SEAFOOD WEATHER DEPENDENT LIVE DUNGENESS CRAB LIVE DUNGENESS CRAB GREEN SEA URCHIN SEA CUCUMBER SALISH SEA FRESH SQUID

Fresh Eastern Fish--Look For Monday Update

Valentines Day Warning
On and around Sunday, February 14, your business will be thronged with famished, amorous customers. Suppliers nation-wide will run short of choice items. We are digging deep to cover you with the premium proteins Lusty Diners demand. Special Fishes!! Fresh Meats!! The Best Distributor list of Small-Farm Oysters in the business! Abundant Pink Dye--We've got you covered!! Don't get caught short!! Call today to set up a Valentines Program. Help us help you!

Department of Land-Based Activities.

Feeding time at Jones Ranch

Hog Call
We slaughtered cattle last week--call now for availability week of Feb. 8- call Sara.
Hogs go this week--available as wholes, halves and in cuts as early as Thurs or for the week of the 8th. We anticipate at least several months of weekly fresh pork availability.

Call for ordering details! Our pastured Lopez Pork is the best anywhere.
Lambs continue to go meekly to the slaughter, week by week and are showing no signs of rebellion. Get yours today!

Non-Gregorian Calendar Corner

Chinese New Year is celebrated at the turn of the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. Festivities start the night before the New Year and extend for fifteen full days of the New Year. The first day of the New Year is held on the new moon between 21 January and 20 February. This year Chinese New Year will be held on Monday, February 8. Each night has a different feasting tradition involving specific dishes, but many oriented around seafood. The New Year eve dinner is known as Reunion Dinner and is generally seafood heavy. This is so because seafood is delicious, and also because the pronunciation of fish (魚yú) makes it a homophone for "surpluses"(餘yú). So, in the interest of a prosperous New Year, eat fish every night, but specifically on the 7th. Sadly, the 13th night of festivities calls for an all-vegetarian menu.

The year beginning Feb 8 will be year 2130, and is the Year of the Monkey in Chinese Astrology.

More Crab! More Geoduck!

In 1928, the ruling Kuomintang under Chiang Kai Shek mandated a Gregorian New Year of Jan 1, but the population refused to accept the change. In 1967 during the Cultural revolution, Chinese New Year celebrations were banned for 13 years in an effort to extract more labor out of the population. The return of traditional celebrations has been a powerful symbol of the unwinding of high-totalitarian laws in China.

These last years Chinese New Year has typically marked the annual peak of prices of Geoduck, Dungeness Crab, Lobster, Shrimp and many fishes. Jumbo Jets laden with Washington origin crab line the runways in Vancouver and Shanghai. Fishermen and brokers world-wide plan trips to Reno based on Chinese New Year winnings. This year, prices have barely budged as we approach the date. Why?

Changing Times

Many past Fish-O-Grams have discussed the changing nature of Chinese purchases of West-Coast seafood and what it means for all of us. Simply put, China became the major driver in global seafood demand and pricing during the early years of the 2000s. In China, imported food in general, and seafood in particular, became a mark of upper and middle class distinction. Also, for good reason, Chinese consumers increasingly distrust their own food supply. For a long decade Chinese demand and pricing ratcheted up every year. This made business easy for brokers on our side of the pond and the persistent lesson learned was, "he who has the product wins", even if product was purchased above market levels, China would always pick up the slack and make long bets good. Fishermen saw the value of their catch rise yearly, brokers splurged on Cadillac Escalades, gold plated e-cigarettes and Rolex watches, and everyone was happy. This dynamic was also alive and well in other resource businesses, including oil, grain and metals. Conventional wisdom held that this perpetual increase was not a bubble, but represented the new normal as the massive Chinese population moved into the global trading gyre.

In 2013 a coast-wide, all-time record salmon catch was met with higher pricing--an unprecedented combination--and supply seamlessly melted away into the marketplace.

Many of the smaller, specialty fisheries saw pricing so high local buyers were priced clean out of certain markets, including Dungeness Crab, Geoduck, Spot Prawns, Seas Cucumbers and Urchins.

Fish Broker in Happier Times

The Bubble Bursts.
Despite brewing stormclouds, 2014 seemed likely to offer the same happy circumstance. The Chinese economy was slowing down. New leadership in Bejing slapped a series of taxes and restriction on imported proteins to reflect the anger of poorer Chinese about wealthier folk eating foreign foods. However, through spring and into summer, prices maintained the momentum of years past and crept higher for the benchmark fisheries, including crab, salmon and halibut. Fresh markets for fish, which are mainly domestic, stayed stable. Then came a series of much larger than expected salmon catches in Canada and Alaska and fish companies began offering unexpectedly large volumes of frozen fish onto the spot markets and found no buyers at advertised prices. Processors kept buying and buying. Sellers lowered prices, still no buyers. Meanwhile the Dollar was rising against other currencies, meaning our fish was pricing itself out of export market after export market. Fish does not improve with age and and storage is expensive--at one point every cold storage on the coast was plugged to the point of refusing product. Some processors were reduced to renting freezer shipping containers and stacking fish up in parking lots.

After Le Bust, Le Deluge

Processors and brokers slowly came to the cold hard truth. China was not going to pick up anyone's slack. Prices began to plunge. Sockeye salmon was the most spectacular example, with pricing falling from roughly $5# for large volume-high quality frozen fish to a reported low of #1 sockeye delivered into Tokyo for $2.15# Larger companies lost huge amounts of money--Icicle Seafoods took such a beating it's owners threw in the towel and put the business up for sale. Frozen Coho prices have fallen below farmed tillapia levels and remain there. Tens of millions of pounds of 2014 product still languish in West Coast cold storage.

In 2015 the pricing knives came out. As with most market crashes the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. Fishermen in Bristol Bay saw boat prices of $.50#, down from $1.40# the year before. 2015 Chinese New Year still brought stratospheric crab prices, but the bloom was clearly off the rose. Last April during the tribal Spot Prawn fishery the live Prawn price fell as low as $4.50# from 2014's $11+#. Even worse, buyers only wanted limited volumes of prawns--we know fishermen who lost thousands of pounds of live prawns waiting for Chinese buyers who never came. For Dungeness Crab, throughout the summer and into fall Chinese exporters have been MIA and brokers have turned their efforts to moving crab into the California and Eastern American market.

Hard times in the Bone Yard.
As goes seafood, so goes other commodities. China has turned off the lights, in the same way the Japanese did in the mid 1990s. We can still remember the log export yard in Anacortes idle and stuffed with premium logs when the Japanese log market collapsed in 1995. Years later the Port chipped the logs to clear the space.
Just for fun, below is a graph showing scrap metal prices.

Should have put the money in Sockeye.

China, Seafood, and You.
We like moderate, stable pricing and abundant supplies. We also like robust economic times. For the moment we seem to have the dream scenario, China has largely withdrawn from the buying end of the business, while our regional economy is ticking away. Therefore, we, and you, enjoy reasonable pricing, abundant supplies and strong local demand. Medium term, our West Coast prosperity has become so entangled with China that a weak China is not good for anyone, even if it means that they leave our Spot Prawns alone. Hopefully troubles in China do not disrupt the Seattle Restaurant Rally. Long term, anyone who bets against 1.4 billion Chinese bootstrapping themselves one way or another is a fool. And, if they appreciate our fish more than we do, then they should probably have it. One of the bitter ironies of American seafood trade is that we generally export our good product and import nasty stuff--farmed tiger prawns and reprocessed fish.
So the best case scenario is that we use this interruption in the Chinese market to build customer appreciation of our local products. When, inevitably, resurgent Chinese demand begins to nudge prices up, hopefully we, and you, can stay in the game with higher prices justified by appreciation of our incomparable seafood.
So enjoy the reasonable prices, don't get too used to them, and above all, stay loose.

JFF Salutes the Monkey
So crab pricing remains stable and frozen fish is still a bargain. What does the Chinese New Year mean to us? Well, Sara and I are both Snakes, in Chinese Astrology. The year of the Monkey can be a good and prosperous year for Snakes, provided we can Out Smart the Monkey. So there you have it. Good times ahead, just be alert and try and stay a step or two ahead of scheming primates.

A Message From the JFF Office.
In order to maintain and improve our level of service as we grow, we are moving to a new system of customer-assigned Representatives.
Seattle Customers; you will be working more closely with Paisley. Northend Customers, you will continue to work with Ivan, but with more individual attention from him. The rest of us will spend our time watching nature videos on the new flat screen and shooting pool. Got it?

New JFF office layout

Sincerely, Your JFF Crew!
Call Paisley (425) 577-2329. Call Nick, Sara, Ivan or Renee, (360) 468-0533

Fish-O-Gram! THINK PINK!!!!! Green Urchins Yes! Oysters Yes! Hometown Heroes! Consider the Tree Lobster!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:56:00 +0000

HOOORAY FOR THE SCALLOPS!!!

Talk to me, Sing to me

Dear Pink-Hued Customers,

Our mission and passion in life is to bring superlative products from our island-studded home to market. We love everything we sell, from Rhode Island squid to Fiji Albacore, to Japanese Tobikko, we love it all. But there is something special about the products that come from this little corner of the world. On land we find that the persistent salt-spray and great day-to-night temperature swings build subtle, piquant flavors in vegetables and meats. By sea we find that the combination of big, clean, moving waters and sweet, protected bays yields finfish, Echinoidea (Urchins) and shellfish that have an unmatch-able combination of flavor profiles, clean and sharp from the big waters, and deep and rich from the abundant food. We are always meditating on what more we can do and bring to you.

Remembrance of things deep and dark
Years back harvest divers were kings of the North-End. Insatiable Japanese demand coupled with huge standing stocks of Urchin and Sea Cucumbers mobilized hordes of neoprene-clad divers. Over every inch of seafloor crawled the treasure hunters. Long ignored or neglected species came to surface for the first time, including thirteen varieties of sea scallop. Most are too scarce to support a commercial fishery, or not especially toothsome. Pink and Spiny scallops, however, are both plentiful--actually they are common as dandelions at certain depths--stock estimates are in the tens of millions of pounds--and delicious. Deep-Venturing divers found pulsating carpets of Pinks and Spinys clinging to ledges and rocky bottoms in high-tidal flow areas. Harvesting them is enchanting, but hazardous. During maximum-flow times, the scallops attach themselves to rocks and one another with byssal threads--the same fibers that constitute Mussel beards. Once the tide slackens, scallops sever their attachments and flutter around like little butterflies, always moving forward as they flap their shells. At the depths they cluster, divers have only minutes to gather product safely. Commencing a commercial fishery in those go-go years was an easy task, and soon Singing Scallops were featured on restaurant menus region-wide. They are truly extraordinary--combining the sweetness of scallops with the depth and richness of clams. A 1987 NYT article neatly sums up the story and appeal of our most abundant natural scallop; http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/10/travel/fare-of-the-country-tiny-pink-scallops-from-puget-sound.html?pagewanted=all

Deep Water Blues--PSP issues, short shelflife, creeping bureaucracy.

Scallops, like other shellfish, mainly eat phytoplankton. At the depths they call home, most plankton is cystic, or dormant cells that have drifted down to the seafloor to await favorable environmental conditions for re-emergence. Pinks and Spinys have the ability to "clap" their shells to stir up sediment from the sea floor and feed on the resulting suspended slurry. Among the many species of phytoplankton with a cystic stage is Alexandrium, the toxin-producing algae that creates red tide. At scallop depths regular monitoring is impossible and with scallops constantly stirring up sediments, PSP levels in scallops can spike anytime, any season. After a series of disastrous product recalls, WA Department of Health eventually required PSP testing of every single batch of scallops harvested. This was a great idea, but swiftly caused another string of problems. Pinks have a very short shelf-life out of water. At most three days. For a diver to send a sample off for sampling cost at least 24 hours, and more likely 36 hours of a 72 hour shelf-life. Hot scallops needed to be dumped, which, given the heroic efforts needed to harvest them, is a bitter pill for harvesters. Divers began holding pinks in barrels and crab traps in marinas and home bays to await test results, but scallops, like other shellfish are filter feeders, and DOH takes a dim view of holding any shellfish in proximity to concentrations of boats and developed areas. By the late 90s the fishery had wound itself down to pretty much nothing. For the next ten years the fishery remained technically open, but no-one harvested. Meanwhile, FDA guidelines, under which DOH operates, stiffened up to the point that open-water harvest of any shellfish became illegal.

Department of Fisheries Revival

Six years ago we bumped into Sara Dickerman at the Willows Inn. At one point Sara asked, "what happened to the pink scallops? They were my favorite thing when I first came to Seattle. Can anyone bring them back?"

Thus began an odyssey through bureaucratic never-land. Rekindling a dormant fishery ought to be easy, thought we. As shellfish growers we deal weekly with DOH. DOH is hands down the best State or Federal agency we work with. Our concept was to bring all harvested scallops home to Shoal Bay to hold in our certified, tested waters until PSP tests come back clean. So doing mean no risk of poisoning anyone, no need to dump hot scallops--we can just hold them until the toxin clears--the scallops are happy in our tanks and the freshness clock doesn't start running until we pull them out of the water--generally an hour or so before the ferry leaves. But open-water harvest, meaning harvest in areas not continuously monitored, is now illegal, acoording to the FDA. Never mind that big water in the San Juans is some of the cleanest water in the world, never mind that surface water samples tell nothing about what is happening 90 feet down, the law is the law. Furthermore, even certifying the scallop harvest areas is troublesome. It takes five years, and DOH is geared to working with shellfish growers, Department of Natural Resources and the Tribes, all of whom have title to the tidelands and bedlands in question. When we tried to submit harvest site certification requests, no dice, because we don't own and can't lease the bedlands. Finally DOH superstars Bob Woolrich and Scott Berbells came up with an elaborate end-run involving tissue sampling, endless mapping and classification work and mandatory transplant/relay periods for the scallops.

Then we slammed into Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. What seemed to us simple--reviving a well-trod commercial fishery--turned into a six-year slog through the wilderness. We tried working with the Tulalips, Lummis and the State. At different times we thought we were close, four times we began gearing up and four times something popped up to dash our dreams. We never forgot, but moved onto other projects. Meanwhile, a few short miles away, unbeknownst to us, Joe Stephens, another would-be scalloper was fighting the same good fight.

Bureaucracy Busters

Last November, during dealings over our cultivation of European Flat Oysters, Rich Childers, Puget Sound Shellfish Manager decided Pinks were a cause whose time had come, and things started to happen. And today we are overjoyed to announce that the Pink/Spiny Scallop fishery will re-commence in a limited area on Jan 26!!!!!!! Thank you Rich!!

Rich Childer, bureaucracy Buster. I speak for the Scallops

Scallops Forward!!!!, Bespoke Hooch

These next weeks we are entering uncharted waters with harvest, relay and paperwork challenges. Chris Sparks, our long-time Urchin diver and Joe Stephens will be heading up harvest efforts. We will focus on relaying, testing and distributing these deep sea treasures. Please bear with us as we work through the layers of logistical, biological and regulatory issues to bring you the FIRST PINK SCALLOPS SOLD IN ALMOST 20 YEARS!!! Look for a schedule of scallop Coming Out events, call Paisley to schedule your own!!!

Also, to accompany the scallops, Owen Roe Winery has custom-crafted a signature Pink Scallop Rose, a blend of the Grosso clone of Sangiovese from the famed Red Willow Vineyard and Cabernet Sauvignon from Own Roe's own Outlook Vineyard. Owen Roe co-owners Ben and Julie Wolff have been our strongest and most steadfast supporters and friends these past few years. They have ridden the roller-coaster of heartbreak and triumph with us through our house fire, business dramas and more. Now we get to partner with them for the Pink Release. This wine will only be available for special scallop events.

Look for first-sale announcements!!!

Scallops will be a limited-supply, high demand product. Ordering restrictions will apply.

Urchins Yet Again

Last weeks' announcement of the ending of the Green Urchin season was highly exaggerated. A few thousands of pounds still remain on the quota and the urchins have not yet spawned. Please enjoy another week of greens and perhaps another week after this. We'll keep you posted.

Still Swingin'-2-U.

Blizzard-Bound Eastern Fishes
Eastern Fishes will return as soon as their weather dies down. Right now everyone is battened down and the airport is not accepting fresh-freight consignments until things settle down. Forecasts call for reasonable weather early next week. Stand by for news of your favorite squid, monk, flounder and eels.
We do have 10# tubs of cleaned squid.

Fresh Fish, Local and Beyond
It is still January, but we have a few solid fresh options for the week ahead.
Steelhead remains plentiful and reasonably priced, Cali Hali is our over-sized flounder of choice, we are getting consistent fresh True Cod from Kodiak. For those who can commit to and handle regular deliveries of 25# cases of true, we are offering substantial discounts--Call Paisley--. We will have a limited volume of farmed sturgeon bullets for Weds and potentially a dab of from Alaska Troll Kings. And for you editorially minded customers, grouper is known as groper when hailing from New Zealand. So thanks, but it is spelled correctly. And think how your customers will respond to Groper on the board.

Frozen Favorites
Don't forget Warner Lew's specialty Togiak Herring, Medium Spot Prawns and Baker River Sockeye. Finish out January with a bang, not a whimper! Go frozen!!


Fresh Meats Fresh Lopez Lamb in wholes, halves and cuts is available until further notice. Fresh Pastured Lopez Pork will be available the first week of Feb. Fresh Skagit Grass-fed beef from the Mainland Cattle Co will be available the second week of February. Call Sara or Paisley for meats info.

Science Corner, Lazarus Bugs.

Lord Howe Island, some 400 miles East of Australia, has some of the most unique fauna on earth.

19th century settlers on Lord Howe Island were welcomed by a unique giant insect, the Tree Lobster.

Can't see the rats from the air

Welcome ashore, white man. Want to go fishing?

These flightless, speedy insects were everywhere on Lord Howe. They eat leaves and decaying vegetation and mate for life, with females being more active and males accustomed to following their mates' lead in feeding and ambling. Daytimes, the male sleeps snuggled around the female. In the absence of males, female Tree Lobsters may reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning that unfertilized eggs may mature and hatch on their own. Lord Howe locals came to consider the the chunky critters as an island mascot, and used them as fish bait. Apparently fishes are passionate about Tree Lobsters. For decades there were plenty of Tree Lobsters for everyone. This idyllic state of affairs came to halt in 1918, when the supply ship, the SS Makambo went aground on Lord Howe and a legion of black rats escaped onto the island and began munching their way through local wildlife, especially these charismatic stick insects . By 1920 the Tree Lobster was declared extinct, another victim of invasive species and the the Island Biology trap.

Decades later climbers venturing up nearby Balls Pyramid Island came upon a dessicated Tree Lobster skeleton. Further parties found a few more skeletons, but no live insects. In 2001, Australian scientists David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile and two assistants travelled to the Balls Pyramid to search for the elusive bug. They scoured the barren island and found only some large insect droppings under a single Melaleuca shrub growing in a crevice 330 ft above the shoreline.

That night they returned to the bush on the theory that the insects might be more active at night. Snuggled under and around the bush they found a community of 24 adult Lobsters.

Two years later a team returned to the island and captured two mating pairs. One pair failed to reproduce, but the other, transported to the Melbourne Zoo has multiplied admirably. Twelve years on the Zoo has successfully spawned over 13000 bugs. Some have now been re-introduced to a rat-free corner of Lord Howe Island and others have been dispatched to other zoos for breeding and display.

One island, one shrub, 24 lobsters.

Tree Lobsters; JFF salutes you! Never give Up!!!

Your JFF Crew