July 13: New way to homepack

We are always looking for fresh produce that will keep for months in our conditions. In early May, we shipped up 20 lb of sweet potatoes, 50 lbs of red potatoes, 50 lbs of sweet onions, 50 lbs of fuji apples, and a few butternut squashes, acorn squashes, and kabocha squashes (which hold for a long time, but intimidate me!). I wasn't involved in packing them for shipping, but David, Sarah, Rohan, and Jeff put layers of newspaper between them and packed each type of produce in its own box. Once they got to the cabin, we've just stored them in my porch which is usually cool... except when the weather is hot.

All the produce did really well. The crew also unpacked them and I understand there was some early loss, but not much. They discarded those before they got to the cabin. Just today, we ran out of apples. The last one was a little bit soft, so we just put it in pancakes. We still have a few sweet potatoes, and most remain unblemished and delicious in our herbed mashed sweet potato recipe (mmmm), the remaining squash are still firm (though the acorns have turned yellow and red). The red potatoes have not started to sprout (though by this time in past years, some of them had), and only a few of the onions were a little moldy. We also just ran out of those. Last year, it seemed that about half of the yellow onions arrived moldy. The produce man told Jeff that the sweet onions store better, and so far, that seems to be true for us in these conditions. Rohan mentioned that it seems to depend on the batch - sometimes yellow onions keep better, sometimes sweet onions do.

Next year, I think we'll bring the same things, less a few of the squash, plus about 20 lbs of onions and maybe 10 lbs of apples and see if next season's conditions continue to be friendly to produce on the porch.

Today's weather was mild enough that we could break into two crews of two (though with the strong current, it is really hard to hold the crosspick!). Rohan and AJ infiltrated the New Boat! Here is a photo of them delivering to the Jacqueline W. The New Boat is tied up on the starboard side of the Jacqueline and they are in the process of lifting the brailer off the skiff to deliver it to their hold. We love it when the Jacqueline can come our way to take deliveries - it's so much less stressful than delivering to the beach where we need to worry about the tide going out from under us, drifting into other people's nets, or hitting the bottom (or worse, a rock) with the prop.

As it turns out, though, we are quite capable of getting ourselves into trouble when the weather is calm and the water is plenty deep enough. After delivering and before going in, we all got into the Ambi to address the location of the Grayling, which had wandered a little too close to our neighbor's net. We decided to pull its anchor and tow it back out of everyone's way before re-setting the anchor. I should have been more alert to the loose anchor line floating in the water during the tow, making sure it was pulled into our boat so that it didn't wrap the prop. Thunk. Whoops. Drop the anchor so we don't drift into someone's net! Rohan lifted the outboard and there was the prop, well wrapped up in the anchor line. Sigh. Luckily there was another skiff nearby (the Grayling) so I could jump into it to get access to the Ambi's outboard without having to hang out of the stern of the Ambi, clinging by my toes to avoid falling in. But it was so well wrapped, I had to cut the anchor line to get it loose. That's twice this year we've had to cut that anchor line. So we have added a new anchor line for both the Grayling and the Ambi to our 2015 shopping list.

We saved out a pile of our most beautiful salmon for homepack. We put them in a brailer and realized that we had a much bigger brailer of "most beautiful salmon" than of "least beautiful salmon," and I was worried about whether we could process that many in one go. So we talked it over and decided that instead of filleting the salmon into sides, we could head and gut them, and fit them into the vacuum seal bags without their tails. So the processing part should be quite a bit faster and it would require only half the pre-freezing space in the big freezer and most importantly, only half of the sealing (which takes almost as long as processing). We decided that we could risk trying to process 60 that way. So Roger and Rohan counted out 60 from the homepack brailer into another brailer... and we discovered that we had originally pulled out exactly 60. I'm glad my crew is tolerant.

Even though these salmon were not for AGS, we asked Brad to help us load them into our truck to take them in to process ourselves and he very generously did. Brad is great! I think this new approach to processing our fish will work well for us. It did turn out to be faster, with the added benefit that if a seal breaks, the whole salmon won't be freezer burned. Maybe at the collar and possibly in the belly, but most of the fish will still be easy to salvage. The downside of this approach is that we pay for shipping the backbone which will then be discarded in Seattle. It might be a worthy trade.

Even though I have a great preference for being down at our cabins instead of in town, I have to give credit where it's due. As we emerged from the conex after finishing the processing, we stepped into this scene... and me without my camera. But as he so often does, Roger saved the day with his, so you too get to see the beauty that washed us at the end of the day. And AJ mentioned that he had seen a rainbow as he was running fish from the conex to the freezer, not realizing the part of his job description is to alert me to such phenomena because I love to see them. Our friend Phil is fond of pointing out that we are all "Bristol Bay millionaires." What more could we ever want?