Two nights ago the Northland spent the night in the Ninilchik Harbor.  As you can see the harbor gets pretty jam packed with gillnetters and starts to look a bit precarious at low tide!  Ninilchik is between the Kasilof River and Homer, near the south line of the fishing area.  It is a tidally restricted harbor, meaning that the entrance and exit is only accessible at high tides.  Most of the boats fishing out of Ninilchik are Russians from one of the nearby settlements.  These settlements started originally as a land grant to Old Believer Russians escaping religious persecution in Russia.  These days there's thriving Russian communities on both sides of Homer and they are hard working fishermen! Today was a good solid day of fishing and Kyle and the crew put up a good load of direct market, top quality, fish for our great customers.  The period was extended until 11pm this evening, so the fishing continues!  Tomorrow is a mandatory closure but within the next week we'll know if the run materializes to be a good return like projected, or if it is simply a little early.

The Northland reported an "exciting day of fishing today", catching about 1,400 Sockeye Salmon.  Kyle said that the fishing was pretty hot right off at 7 a.m., then slow most of the day and then strong again before closing at 7 p.m.  If the run of salmon comes in strong we can hope for some good back to back fishing in the next weeks.   One of the many BEAUTIFUL Kenai Reds and HANDSOME deckhand Jake.

 

A number of customers have asked us general questions over the past years about our drift gillnet fishing operation.  Here's an attempt at starting to publicly answer a few of them.  Let us know if you have more questions!

• Length of our boat:  The Northland is 32 feet long.
• Size of our net:  Our net is 3 shackels long, each shackel is 50 fathoms and each fathom is 6 feet-- for a total of 900 feet in length.  It is 45 meshes deep (diamond shapes of net), each mesh being 5.125 inches high-- for a total of 230.6 feet.  However this depth is a little misleading because it is never fully stretched out while fishing.
• Number of boats in Cook Inlet:  There are 600 permits out there and about 400 boats fishing.  A boat can double up their permits and be allowed to fish one more shackle and other permits are not fished.
• Number of Salmon in Cook Inlet:  This varies year to year, but last year 6.4 million salmon returned to Cook Inlet.  The fishery was regulated for an escapement, or upriver return, of 1.2 million fish.  The remaining fish were divided amongst the user groups- commercial (drift and set gillnet), sport and personal use.
• Number of days we fish in a season:  If there are a lot of fish they let us fish more and vice versa.  This generally ranges between 16-30 fishing days.
• Percentage of our catch that we sell directly to customers:  Again, it all varies but last year we sold a little under 10% of our catch directly to customers and the rest was offloaded and sold to our cannery.

The Upper Cook Inlet Salmon fishery is underway.

With four days already fished the season looks like it has the potential to be a good one.  The Kasilof River already has a return of over 125,000 sockeye, which is the highest return this early in the season ever recorded.  One never knows how the season will end, until a while after it's over and the cannery actually pays up, but it's always fun to get excited.  Prices tend to be highest for the first few deliveries, until the market gets flooded with fish, so we will wait a little before putting up our top quality direct market fish. On the quality front, Kyle has spent the last few weeks installing a Refrigerated Salt Water (RSW) system.  With the RSW we are able to pump chilled sea water (32-35 degrees) into the fish holds to constantly keep the fish cold.  This means no more ice and the constant temperature should even improve the quality of your fish! On the fun and family and historic front, we spent last week across Cook Inlet at Snug Harbor celebrating Gramma Margie Mullen's 93rd birthday and Summer Solstice with 30 family members.  Snug Harbor was one of the biggest canneries in Cook Inlet from about 1930-1970.  What a stunning place!  It was a great location for the first two fishing openers because it is down near the southern line of the fishing boundary, where the early season fish first show up.  The bear viewing, clamming, paddling and fishing were fantastic- especially with such great company.

Kyle, JP and Jake are finishing up two back to back days of fishing.  Extra days of fishing, beyond the scheduled Monday and Thursday schedule, are allotted based on the number of fish up the river.  Yesterday was good early season fishing for the corridor (a restricted area near the beach) with over 300 fish caught and the mid-day report for today was pretty good with about the same number of fish.

Thanks for reading.

  Thanks to everyone who has placed an order!  We appreciate your business, your feedback and most of all your enthusiasm for our fish. If you're a new customer or know of someone who wants to be a new customer, we're ready for your order.  We have room for about 25 more 'for sure' orders and will keep adding people to our list after that on more of a 'wait list' basis. A few quotes from pleased customers: "Hooray - happy time of year for those of us who love your salmon!  Last year was our first year and we have been thrilled.  What we buy in the store tastes terrible by comparison." R.W. Simsbury, CT "My girls - ages 4 and 1 1/2 - love your salmon and I hope your new little one will, too.  Thank you so much for offering this!" C.W. Homer, AK "The salmon from you guys last year is/was THE BEST salmon I've ever eaten ... period, bar none ... and I've eaten a ton of it in my lifetime!!  Looking forward to the next "batch" ... and thanks again!!" S.M. Seattle, WA "The salmon we bought last year was fantastic – best we ever had!" V.W. Anchorage, AK "Looking forward to more luscious salmon!" D.G. Seattle, WA "My salmon stock is almost gone!!  We've loved your salmon all year long ... and everytime we serve it to friends they love it too." M.S. Minneapolis, MN

We're ready to take orders for 2013! We're giving returning customers two weeks to get their orders in and then we'll go down our list of interested customers and reach out to new customers.  We've had a few changes in our life, having a baby and moving more full time Alaska, and are making changes in our business to reflect those changes.  This year we will only offer Scrumptious Salmon Shares two ways: shipped directly to you or picked up in Homer.  (Sorry Methow and Anchorage!). Price estimate for 2013:  $15.20/lb for a 25 pound Scrumptious Sockeye Salmon Share shipped directly to you or $13.90/lb for a 50 pound share.  $8.75/lb for a Scrumptious Sockeye Salmon Share picked up in Homer.  (The small price increase is because we expect the dock price of fish to go up a little this year.  We'll make any adjustments up or down once the fish are caught to offer the most fair and affordable price we can.)  For more information, read all the details about our Salmon Shares and how to place an Order.

We've been a little preoccupied lately with our new small fry, Margaret Chenel Lints.  Maggie was born on November 11th at 12:00am in Brewster, WA.  She weighed 7 pounds 14.5 ounces and was 20 3/4 inches long.  She is now 13 weeks old and is growing and changing every day.  Maggie loves skiing! and sunbathing (more like shade bathing)!  Maggie is generally very sweet but can get a little crabby at times.  On other notes, we will continue to offer Small Scales Seafood's Scrumptious Sockeye Salmon Shares in 2013.  Keep eating your 2012 fish so that you have room for the freshest fillets this year.  (Hopefully our quality salmon is making salmon snobs out of all of you, and a salmon snob never eats a year old fish!)  We will post 2013 order information in the near future.

Hi Salmon Eaters, We wanted to let everyone know that we are completely sold out for 2012.  Thanks to everyone for your business and for spreading the word to help us sell all of our salmon.  Send us an email if you'd like to be put on our pre-season email list for next season. Until then, happy scrumptious salmon eating! Emily and Kyle

Full Truck

We're headed south today, leaving a foggy Homer, AK.  It's been a fabulous summer up here and we're a bit reluctant to leave, but look forward to our Washington adventures.  Our truck is packed to the brim with 3 freezers full of 850 pounds of Sockeye, 3 dogs weighing some 220 pounds and the two of us (plus a growing baby in the belly). We hope to be in the Methow Valley by the end of this week or the beginning of next, so Methow folks check your emails for delivery info soon.

Upon our final freezer tally we have 10 shares (at 25 pounds each) left, so let us know if you'd like more scrumptious salmon or let others know about our great fish.

Good Looking

 

Only a few weeks ago we were just finishing boat work, beginning to fish some slower days, waiting for the fish to show up, diligently putting up our top quality direct market fish.  Suddenly the fish started coming in big numbers! Kyle, the crew and the Northland fished for 12 days straight.   Two really great days helped to make the season a great season for us- one where we deckloaded (filled all the hatches and had to bag fish on deck) and one with a nice boatload (below hatches.)

Click here for a short video of the deckload.

A number of pretty good catching days have rounded things out.  Last night was the first night that Kyle, Jake and JP slept off the boat and they're recuperating after their long push.  During the last two weeks they were only able to get a few hours of sleep a night in between all their duties; by the time the fishing period ended at 7 or 10pm, they ran the boat back into the river (which is tidally dependent especially with a slower boat), waited for an off load at the dock around 3am and then soon headed out again to be on the grounds to set the net out again by 7am. We'll fish again on Monday to see what's still out there and sooner or later pull the boat out of the water.  It's always remarkable that on a big day some 2,600 fish are caught and now we're down to about 50 fish a day (with less Sockeye each day and more and more Humpies), with our low point at the beginning of the season being 7 fish!  When the fish come they come!  That's why we really try to put up our direct market fish before the peak of the run hits, so that we can manage the quality the best. We've sold pretty much all the direct market scrumptious salmon we put up (THANKS!). If you're still interested about fish this year, let us know and we can see if there's a little extra once we've delivered fish to everyone.

A few snapshots:

Fish Pickin' The Gear Out, Waiting for Fish Icing the Beauties Kyle's View From the Flying Bridge, Looking for Jumpers Late Night Sunset

The amped up flying bridge- better for fish finding.[/caption] With a few weeks of fishing under our belts the jury is still out as to if the run is coming in small or coming in late.  We're keeping our fingers crossed for late but large!  The good news is that the fish are still super beautiful and because we are still small scale we'll still surely get all of our great customers some Scrumptious Salmon! 2012 Prices: $8.50/lb for Homer pickups, $9/lb for Methow and Anchorage pickups.  $14.95/lb (salmon, packaging and shipping included) for shipped orders of 25 pounds.  $13.65/lb (salmon, packaging and shipping included) for shipped orders of 50-150 pounds. 2012 Ship/Pickup Dates:  Our shipped orders will begin shipping out July 16th.  Homer pickups will be ready starting July 23rd.  Anchorage delivery will happen on August 3rd from 5:30-7pm at REI.  Methow pickups will be available approximately August 16th-23rd.  More orders?:  We're pretty full but have friends contact us to get on our waitlist. A few small print details you don't really need to know (but you might want to know):  We are switching from our former processor Coal Point, to Tanner's Seafoods.  Coal Point decided at the last minute that they were not able to fillet our fish.  We feel great about Tanner's Seafoods and are thankful to have found such a quality operation.  We will now be shipping UPS and not FedEx because of this change.  The only real difference this makes is that rural and non-rural shipping prices are now the same.  Your fish should be as amazing as ever and will otherwise be the same great product!