Mark Stopha - Alaska Wild Salmon Company

Berries and salmon

Andrew started his new job after working two jobs, supporting two families, and getting his masters degree. His new job leaves more time to fish and overnight out of town, and he was ready to go to the cabin for fishing and berry picking. My boat is in the shop so we borrowed Jeff and Kurt’s skiff. I always feel like a 20 something again on the tiller handle of a skiff. We fished in the rain all day and not a strike.

We headed to the cabin. Andrew was soon down for a nap and I steamed the crab from the pots. I’d noticed some big red huckleberries on the hike in, and told him I was off to berry pick. He perked up and grabbed the other berry rake and away we went. I had him pick blueberries and blue huckleberries and I soloed on the red huckleberries. We picked for about an hour and got a quart or two each.

I used the blueberries in the pancakes this morning and Andrew was impressed. They don’t really have berries in Sierra Leone that I remember- just the bigger fruits like oranges, pineapple, guava and mango. He was also impressed at the volume of berries in the woods. It’s really incredible this time of year. He asked how else he could eat them, and when he mentioned smoothies, I said yes, that’s a common use. Samuel loves smoothies he said, and they’d try them. I told him berries are like salmon – you can pretty much fill your freezer with them. So maybe I’ll get a berry picking partner now.

We pulled the pots in the morning and had more crab. Andrew was getting the idea. I rarely leave the cabin without some food stuff going to the freezer.

We headed north to try a spot nephew John and I fished daily years ago. We put our gear down and in less than 5 minutes, Andrew had a nice chrome coho on. We got it to the net and into the boat. I put it on a stringer, broke a gill, and put it over the side to bleed. We fished the rest of the morning in dry weather and not another strike.

We pulled our gear a few hours later and headed to the dock, just as more rain hit. It was pouring down now, but the dock was not far and we had our rain gear on so we just grinned and bared it.

I cleaned the crab and salmon at the dock. I cut off the tail section for Sara and I for dinner, and gave Andrew the rest of the salmon and the crab we caught this morning. The other crab and some king salmon we caught in Craig in June are going to a friend who recently lost her husband to sudden sickness a few months ago and her son before that a few years back when the crabber he was on went down in the Bering Sea. I know she will appreciate it.

Pandemic Whales

I took an old friend and her friend fishing. We were headed out to Hand Trollers Cove after coho salmon. On the way through North Pass, I saw a whale blow. And then another. A mom and baby. We stopped to watch. My two passengers had moved to Anchorage from Juneau and Kodiak, so didn’t see whales like they used to.

We were the only boat there, unlike the summer, when there could be 20 whale watch boats lining the short of the pass. The water was flat calm. Then the calf breached. Again and again. It was just us. Watching. When I was a whale watch captain, I could see the whales, but aside from hearing them blow, I could hear nothing else over the engines. Now we could hear the splash of every leap. Mother was nearby, and humped her back to dive. We could even hear the tail come up and out of the water as she dove. The calf breached for about 15 minutes, and we continued watching for another 15 minutes and then motored down to the cove.

We caught a nice coho for the day, but just the one. The whale show made the day, and with the tourist economy all but shut down, I felt like we were stealing from someone, having all this to ourselves.

Rhubarb Bagels

Along with my own patch, I have a trapline of people in town who let me pick their rhubarb. I think most inherited their plants with their homes and just don’t use it.

After I harvest, I dice it up and vacuum pack in about 4 cup bags. The freezer is filling up with rhubarb. I’ve made jam with rhubarb alone, rhubarb and cherries, pies, and chutney. But after canning cases of all of these, the rhubarb still continues to grow in the freezer.

I started making bagels when the pandemic started. I’ve tried making bread many times in the past. I can do all of the mixing and kneading and rising with the bread, but bake time was always a wild card. The recipe might call for 50 minutes, and I’d pull the bread out then. When we’d go to eat it, it was soft in the middle. Probably needed 5 or 10 minutes more.

Bagels are different. You make the dough, let it rise a couple times, shape bagels, and let it rise again. The cooking part is alot more fool proof: First you boil, them you bake. The bagels are supposed to be chewy. And chewy is a big range. They always come out okay.

So, how to use the rhubarb. I’ve tried adding some to batches, and have gradually increased the amount of rhubarb. The last batch, I used 4.5 cups of flour with teaspoon of salt. 1 cup of sourdough starter with a 1.5 teaspoons of yeast, and 2 cups of rhubarb puree. The rhubarb puree is 2 cups of diced rhubarb with sugar sprinkled on top, baked in the toaster oven at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, and then pureed in the Vitamix.

I put the puree in the bottom of the kitchen aid bowl, then poured in the dry flour and salt, and then the sourdough starter with yeast, and mixed with the kitchen aid bread hook. I added a little water as the hook worked the dough as needed until it was just moist enough to form a mass of dough that looked right, then let it knead with the bread hook for 10 minutes or so.

I did two, ~ 2 hour rises of the dough, and it had a slight reddish hue from the rhubarb.

After the second rise, I made rings of dough, and put them on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper and let them rise a bit longer.

On the stove, I put on about a gallon of water with a 1/4 cup of sugar and 2 teaspoons of baking soda to boil.

When the water was boiling, I boiled the bagels for a minute on each side, then put them on a rack drip dry.

I brushed the tops of them with egg white wash, put them on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper, and baked them for 20 minutes at 425 degrees.

The bagels came out nice and chewy, and you can’t tell or really taste the rhubarb.

I’m going to try to increase the rhubarb volume to 3 cups for the next batch and see how that goes.

Blueberries

Blueberries are at their peak now. I don’t seem to have the gusto to pick that I used to. I used to pick steady for the day. Now, I pick a couple berry rake fulls of berries, which I found takes an hour, then come in and drink coffee and read and listen to the radio for an hour. I did this four times so got a few gallons of berries. Our blueberries and blue huckleberries have worms in them and so you can put the berries in water and this makes them come out. It takes awhile to get all the leaves out and then pick the berries out of the water little by little by hand and flick away any worms. I’m sure you never get them all, and I’m sure the berries are healthier for you with the added protein.

I did some good reading of 1970’s era Alaska magazines, when the pipeline was being built, before the permanent fund dividend existed and long before it became the focus of state lawmakers and their constituents, and when the magazine was as much for Alaska residents as it was for Outsiders. Regular people writing about their canoe trip down the Yukon or the elder basketball game between Kotzebue and Noorvik.

The blue huckleberries weren’t even much started two weeks ago and now are coming on strong and will be ready to pick in another couple weeks.

Got a half dozen crab in the pots, most of which I gave to a city worker who has been running ragged helping to manage the covid virus situation. For the most part, it seems our town has pulled together to try to control the virus, and it’s good to see.

Pandemic Bears

A friend from Haines sent her car down to Juneau for service, and this morning we put the car back on the ferry to get it back to her. I drove out our only highway from downtown to the ferry terminal. No one was going my way at all, and I passed only a handful of cars heading to town. Early am or not, this is not the usual during a non-pandemic, cruise ship filled summer. As I neared Lemon Creek, I saw something black moving out in the grass a couple hundred yards from the road. Two young black bears were sparing in the early morning quiet.

After I put the car on the ferry, Sara picked me up for the ride home, a couple miles from the ferry, another bear strolled across the road. Then it squatted wayyyyy down on all fours to squeeze under the guard rail, then sauntered up the bike path.

Another Trip of a lifetime up the Taku River

Leon took me up the Taku River to subsistence fish. After a couple days of really heavy rain that followed days of just plain rain, we were welcomed to the trip with partly sunny skies and no rain. The river was very high with the earlier torrential rains, and as we traveled at high tide, it was tough to see where the channel was and where the submerged sand bars were. The first part of the trip in the saltwater is easy. As we got near the first of 4 or 5 glaciers, we collected some glacier ice to keep the fish cool. Then the fun starts.

Once you leave the ocean and enter the mouth of the river, the river widens and it’s hard to tell where it’s shallow and where there’s a channel to run a boat. Many Juneauites have cabins up the river near the Canadian border, and they have big jet boats that are tailored for this trip, but not as efficient for an all around boat since jet boats are less fuel efficient than prop boats.

GPS has certainly helped things as once you run the river without touching bottom and record it on your gps, you can follow your track with pretty fair confidence for the rest of the season. If you only go up once a year like we do, you can plan to try to vaguely remember earlier trips, and also have confidence in your partner that if we find the shallows, I will hop out in my chest waders to push us to deeper waters and then hop back in to feel our way upriver.

We moved up the river, picking our way and finding shallows. Then a year-round river resident passed us in his boat, and we quickly followed him. We cruised past 5 or 6 glaciers, some that come right to the river edge. We picked up some glacier ice chunks floating in the water for our ice chests to keep our fish cool. It’s like another planet.

We made our way up to our fishing site to find flooding like we’d never seen before in earlier trips. There was no beach to fish from, so I lived in my chest waders, which was fine as the air temperature wasn’t too hot and the water not too cold. We set our net after greeting the fish technicians operating fish wheel operation, and settled in for an overnight trip.

We scratched a few fish here and there, mostly sockeye, but with a coho here and there, a surprise king once in awhile, and a few pinks. Leon had me bring a smaller meshed net than his as he’d heard that the sockeye – our target fish – were running small. We set our net off a point 20 yards from our net. It sunk out of sight in about 10 minutes. We pulled on both the shore line and the buoy line, and it was solidly stuck. I didn’t feel any give to make me think it could have been a tree, and thought it must be wrapped around a rock, and maybe when the river subsided, the net could be retrieved. When Leon mentioned this to the young men at camp, they were having none of it. Soon, they had the net pulled up and out of the river. It had snagged on a submerged cottonwood tree. It was so twisted up I didn’t try to unravel it, but will when I have more time.

About an hour later, the tree dislodged, and the top of it popped up out of the water. And right into Leon’s net. The boys again came to the rescue, and separated the tree from the net, tied the tree off to their boat, and got it out into the main current and sent it on it’s way.

We set up Leon’s tent, and he cooked us beans and sausage on a bun for dinner. We napped through the short darkness with the fish wheel below our tent, croaking and groaning away in the river.

We fished till about 230 the next afternoon so we could catch the high tide home. We caught enough fish for Leon, an old timer he was proxy fishing for, and a friend I was proxy fishing for. I took home one small sockeye for us to eat for dinner, as I already had plenty of king salmon from June in the freezer.

Still no rain for the ride home, although the clouds were moving in. We make it down to the glaciers without incident, but were confused as which channel to take when we reached the first glacier. Getting stuck in shallow water going downstream is bad because the current may force your water onto the shallows, making it difficult to move the boat back upstream to deeper water and jump in and get going before you’re pushed into the shallows again.

Luck was on our side again, as here comes a river boat on step coming our way. We pull over and let the boat pass, then try to keep up behind them. We tracked through some of the narliest areas, but the boat was much fast than we were, and we finally ground out on a gravel bar. I jumped out, and luckily we were on the upstream side of the channel. We soon found the channel, I hopped in, and we tried to track the boat that was now just a speck on the horizon.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. The water was flat, there was no wind, and the gillnet opening had closed so no gillnets to dodge.

We stopped at Leon’s in the channel to get his proxy’s cooler, then continued to the harbor. I took my proxy’s fish and headed home. Only then did it start to lightly rain.

Once home, I cleaned the 10 sockeye for our proxy and the one for us, and delivered the fish to our friend. Another trip of a lifetime.