Crap this job is fun.
In Ecuador I saw power and home freezer, but where to get ice when it hit me: just freeze water in water bottles and clean the bottles off each day. Not perfect but a cheap start to chilling fish and improving fish quality. Then here I am in Madagascar. No power or home freezers in the village, but ice in blocks available in the town.
But with catches so sporadic now with the trawlers hoovering up the fish offshore so there’s not shit inshore it’s risky to buy ice knowing it will definitely melt but no certainty that there will be fish to cool.
I was just channelling my Peace Corps trainer Eileen and brainstorming to my supervisor and mentioned salt, knowing it’s usually a costly commodity. He says we got yer salt mine right here and it’s cheap! So I get cracking researching salting fish.
We go to get a bag and it’s two freaking dollars for a 60 kilo bag! That’s about a penny a kilo to salt fish at 3 to 4 kilos salt to 10 kilos of fish. We figured this out 2 days into the 5 day assignment, so we bought a bag of salt and some fish and the community women cleaned and cut the fish like they would to smoke them and we salted them down today and didn’t uncle Mark get that little rush, like catching a king salmon or taking a deer.
