June 20 2016: My birthday and the solstice... and another broken anchor line

We got to fish today! We didn't try to fish the early tide and instead set on the afternoon tide. That gave me the chance to take a quick trip into town to see if Sarah's permit had arrived (so that we could fish all four sites). It hadn't! So we started the process of tracking down the problem. The permit people said that they had sent a letter to Sarah and Roger five days earlier saying that they had not received an Intent to Transfer from Roger so the transfer could not be completed until August 9th. This was not expected by anyone since we all knew Roger had sent in an Intent in March. So neither Roger nor Sarah paid much attention to the letter. Roger, because he thought it was just a form letter confirming the process so he didn't read it carefully, and Sarah because she was en route to here.

The nice permit lady said that we could either take the time to try to find the confirmation of the intent that they sent back to Roger, or Sarah and Roger could both send in a signed note saying that they wanted a temporary transfer so that Sarah could fish the permit, along with $50. That seemed like the wise course of action. We rode the process through until receiving the confirmation that they would put the permit in express mail and send it out on Monday. But still, we could fish only three sites. I couldn't figure out whether to hope we'd get a lot of fish or not many. I want fish, and I don't want to miss fish. Luckily, my hoping probably doesn't have much impact on our catch, so it doesn't really matter whether I hoped for the right thing.

We were setting on a big hold-up tide. That means that the water doesn't go out very far - the outside buoys weren't even uncovered. The first thing we do is to check everything we can. So on the way out, look at the anchors and the lines on both ends. Are the shackles still wired? Does everything look intact? Are any lines wearing? Is the anchor line twisted around the anchor? Check it all out, straighten it all out, and move to the next buoy where we check the same things. The inside buoy of #1 was fine. The outside anchor line - that is, the line between the buoy and the screw anchor - was all twisted up and confusing. And in shallow, slow-moving water. We followed it back toward the anchor and found that the anchor line was broken.

Pretty cleanly broken. (In a little foreshadowing that is possible only because I'm behind on the blog, after a lot of digging deep into the mud, Patrick and Jeff managed to reach down to the screw anchor that's been buried for more than five years, and by feel, remove the wire from the shackle, then the rusty old shackle itself, along with the broken end of the cable. Here it is.) Remember that we actually have two anchor lines coming off the screw anchor. One goes up to the buoy which attaches to the corkline when the net is set (we call that one the anchor line), and the other clips to the ring on the buoy for safe-keeping when we're not fishing, but when the net is set, it attaches to the leadline. (We call that one the V-line, because it makes a V with the anchor line at the point of the anchor.) The line leading to the buoy, the anchor line, had snapped and the v-line was what kept the buoy ... and the Ambi, where we wanted them to be. That was an alarming discovery.

At first, I scrambled to figure out how to mend the broken line and fish with an intact anchor line and v-line... and then I remembered that we had a site that we wouldn't be using that tide (since we didn't have a permit for it). So we pushed over to it and set out on Sarah's site. When we first set our nets, the weather started out cold, rainy, and windy - great fishing weather. By the time we had finished, the sky was blue. Now it was time to go in and wait for more water.

I wanted to get started on my birthday dinner, cake first (life is uncertain) so Jeff took the Ambi crew out on the flood and David took the New Kid crew on the ebb. By then, it had started raining again - good thing because it's good for the fish. They brought in 405 pounds!! I'll say that I took it all personally. 405 lbs? Because it's my birthday. And merely a coincidence that no one had been fishing in that water for three days.

By the time they were done, the sun was out and hot. Once again, really, a nice gift from nature.

Birthday dinner was elaborate because the crew made elaborateness possible. (And it was a great day for Oksanna photos!)

They brought up the first two fish for

salmon cakes (kind of like crab cakes, but with salmon. This recipe, from Diane Morgan's cookbook Salmon, calls for baking the salmon first while sauteing ginger, onions, celery, and red bell pepper in butter. Then mixing together mayo, lemon juice and some herbs and spices, adding in the flaked salmon then the vegetables, combining the mixture very carefully into cakes that need to sit in the tundra-ator for a while. They are delicate.

I had learned earlier about Inku's ability with panko and his careful and determined persistence. So he got the job of cooking those difficult salmon cakes.

The first year I told Jeff I would make salmon cakes for my birthday, he thought I was talking about birthday cake kind of cake. Even though he was a little skeptical, he really isn't one to judge, and besides, he was confident in my ability with desserts. David L said that when he was looking at the batter for the chocolate chip orange cake (from Seattle's Junior League Cookbook) and he saw the little flakes of orange, he assumed they were pieces of salmon, rather than the orange zest that they actually were. I do appreciate their faith in my single-mindedness and salmon creativity.

Oksanna had mixed up some teriyaki from a Ray's Boathouse recipe that was also published in the Junior League cookbook. We cut up the second salmon and started that soak going.

It turns out that Austin is a grilling kind of guy, so he was willing to take on the responsibility of cooking the teriyaki salmon, which became the meal's appetizer because of the haphazard order in which parts of the meal were ready. I just want to give us credit for not starting with the cake since it was ready first.

At the end of the tide, the crew also brought in a small king. I

love to brine those. I use 1/2 C rock salt dissolved in 1/2 gallon of water, then let the filleted salmon soak in that for about 30 minutes. If you have a little longer, then after the 30 minutes are up, remove the fillets from the brine, dry them off, and let them sit in the refrigerator for as long as you have, allowing the salt to equilibrate through the salmon. When it's time to grill it, get the grill hot, rub the salmon flesh with olive oil and grind on some lemon pepper (from Trader Joe's). Then I start the grilling process with the flesh directly on the grill and close the lid. It should be ready to release after 5-8 minutes so I turn it over them and close the lid again. After 5 minutes or so, I start gently pressing on the flesh of the salmon to see how squishy it is. It will become less squishy as it cooks. You want it to be a little underdone when you take it off the grill because it will continue cooking for a while. As the final test of readiness, I put a spatula under the middle of the salmon and lift up a little to see if the meat flakes (cooked) or just stays as one chunk (not cooked yet).

While I mixed up the salmon cakes, David L labored over the satsuma, red onion, and jicama slaw - without the jicama.

It calls for a lot of chopping, especially when we substitute canned water chestnuts for jicama.

And here are the jicama/water chestnut salad and the Greek salad that Jeff is working so hard to create here. This dinner required a lot of chopping.

Austin and Matt worked together to peel and slice 8 lbs (8 lbs??!!) of sweet potatoes to produce the herbed mashed sweet potatoes you can see in this photo. When sliced into 1/4" slices, they still have to cook for more than an hour, but once cooked, they mash up well. Add in some carmelized onions and mmmmm.

Matt's job during this process was running fish guts over the cliff and below the tide line (more on this later)

and, in a part of the job he shares with Oksanna, keeping us all light and happy. (More on that later.) Another of Oksanna's unofficial jobs is photo journalist, particularly when it comes to documenting beauty. I think I just hit the limit on the length of a blog, so this will be continued in the next one...