Ice-Fishing on the Newhalen River

Posted on February 16, 2020 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

We were on the ice mostly to have a look and get a photo or two, but when I was offered a turn at fishing… how could I say “No?” It didn’t take long to put a pan-sized rainbow on ice. It took me back to being a kid on Pennsylvania’s Clarion River trying to get a few tasty perch for a wintertime fish-fry.

From an upstairs window, we could see the anglers begin to gather across the river. “Let’s go see what they’re up to!” It’s about a quarter mile walk to the river from our place and another three-quarters of a mile across the frozen water. No worries. The ice is over two feet thick.

Ray Wassillie had organized the gathering and brought along the power ice auger. Now we want one! Between the Newhalen River and local lakes, there is an abundance of wintertime quarry: Northern Pike, Lake Trout, Dolly Varden Char, Rainbow Trout, Grayling and Burbot!

We’re both battling colds and therefore didn’t hang around long. The fishing was just starting to heat up as we were leaving and I really wanted a shot of someone pulling in a decent fish. This woman had the hot hand, so I kept my camera trained on her. Of course, that put the jinx on her. After a lull that seemed to last forever, she finally had a bite… and pulled out this tiddler! Some of the fish were pushing 20 inches… guess you’ll have to take our word for it.

In addition to a “Big Fish” contest, there was a side event to see who could chop through 30 inches of hard ice the old fashioned way – with a steel pike. Up from New York on a student teaching stint, Griffin was game. Talk about work though. I think he sufficiently had the “idea” of it by the time he got a foot or so into it and wisely put the pike aside to get back to fishing.

I had not intended to fish, but when Ray offered a line, what could I say? My first fish through the ice in… geez, over 40 years. As it is with any addiction, I should have known not even to unscrew the cap from the bottle. We’re now shopping ice augers!

First Silver of 2018

Posted on September 8, 2018 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Ocean-bright and full of fight, Barbra’s 12-pound Coho today is the first and only salmon we’ve put on the bank this year… so far.

In each our previous six years in Alaska, our fish for the coming months were long ago caught, cleaned, freezer-packed or smoked and canned and put away.

Not this year.

Like a lot of salmon runs around Alaska, here on the Chignik River its been a mere trickle of fish compared to other years. In fact, for a few weeks in July fishing was closed altogether. Still, we were confident upon returning from our bike trek in Hokkaido that we’d be able to get the couple of dozen or so fish we need.

That was nearly a month ago. Admittedly, it’s not like we’ve been hitting the water every day. But the few times we’ve been out, it’s been discouraging. When lots of salmon are around, so are bears, eagles and seals, and we can generally see lots of jumpers – salmon fresh from the sea and full of energy spontaneously leaping for whatever reasons salmon spontaneously leap. But it’s been eerily quiet; the usual eagle roosts have been empty.

Even in this down year, hundreds of thousands of Sockeyes ascended the river, and there will undoubtedly be thousands of Coho as well. It felt great to finally get one. Pasta with fresh salmon is on the menu tonight.

Corrupting a Child into the Art of Angling: a Journey from Granny Knots to 8-Weights

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

The 2018 cover of the Southwest Alaska Fishing Regulations featuring my photography: I was out on the ice last winter when I happened upon these two cuties (Barbra’s students) trying their luck for Dolly Varden Char and smelt on Chignik Lake. Teaching a young person to fish is an action that can have long legs and far-reaching positive consequences.

My father started my little sister and me with granny knots, #6 hooks, 10 lb test line, wine cork bobbers and solid fiberglass poles sans reels. Hers had a red handle. Mine was green. Half-a-mile below our house down the winding Route 322 hill lay Piney Dam Reservoir, an impoundment on western Pennsylvania’s Clarion River which, back in those days, was fairly fishless thanks primarily to acid runoff from coal strip mines and effluent from a paper mill 60 miles upstream. This was in the days before President Nixon’s executive order establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. The river looked clean – but the acid runoff left it relatively sterile, bereft of the web of aquatic weeds, tiny crustaceans and insect that make up a healthy ecosystem. These days, the coal mines are mostly gone, grown over with mixed forests of white pine and oak and other hardwoods that have reclaimed the landscape from the war-zone look I remember from childhood. Thanks to EPA regulations, the mining operations that remain are much more responsibly operated. Meanwhile, the paper mill modernized, also guided by EPA regulations. Now trout, bass, muskellunge, decent-sized panfish and, I’m told, even walleyes swim in waters that back in my day held little more than a few stunted sunfish, perch, shiners and bullheads.

Given time, if the Earth isn’t damaged too much, it can heal.

On the sunny side of the valley at the foot of the old 322 bridge was a small, wooden, long-abandoned dock. The steps leading down the steep embankment were rotting and coming apart. The dock itself wasn’t in much better shape. But unclaimed, we called it ours, as in “Let’s go fishing at our dock.”

Even digging up a coffee can’s worth of worms in preparation for those trips was an adventure, and with my dad being a biologist, something of a science lesson as well. For starters, we discovered that there were different kinds of worms; the little red ones worked best. And turned up by Dad’s spade would be other creatures: beetles and beetle larvae, centipedes and millipedes and alien-looking chrysalises. Sometimes garter snakes and little green snakes would glide out of the weeds ahead of us, and a rock turned over might reveal mice tunnels, big black crickets or shy red-backed salamanders with their protruding, otherworldly eyes.

There are four indispensable characteristics an adult must possess if he or she expects to successfully corrupt a child into the art of angling:

The adult must know where there are fish an inexperienced child would be able to catch…
…and he or she must know how to catch those fish in the easiest manner conceivable.
Once conditions one and two have been met, the adult must possess the abundance of patience necessary to allow the young person to figure out how to catch those fish.

To his credit, although my dad took along his own outfit, after casting far from the cover of the dock out into featureless water where there would be no fish, he would set his rod down, ignore it, and focus on my sister and me. That way, if one of us might say, “Dad, you should fish too,” he could truthfully reply, “I am fishing.”

There were always a few panfish hanging out in the dock’s shade – diminutive bluegills and pumpkinseeds, a shiner or two, and our favorites for their combination of size, brilliant orange fins and qualities on the table, yellow perch. The shiners, too bony to deal with, went back into the water. As for the rest of the fish, five-inches was enough to make a “keeper,” and those went on a hand-made stringer. As long as we didn’t fish it too often, the dock could be counted on for a meal’s worth of fish.

The fourth characteristic necessary to develop an enthusiastic young fisherman is probably the most important. The adult must know when enough is enough. My sister and I were diligent in our attention to our wine-cork bobbers, staying with them as they rocked in the wake of ski boats, not moving our eyes from them for long minutes when they just sat there on placid water doing nothing. We didn’t miss many bites. But as time went by and we thinned the dock’s population of fish, bites became fewer and further between. The sun climbed higher and grew hotter. Small stomachs started to growl.

My father seemed to have a sixth sense for impeccably timing the question, Are you ready to call it a day?

No! Not yet! Let’s stay! Just one more? We’d plead.

Well, my dad would wisely say while enthusiasm was still running high, We’ve got enough for a meal. Your mother’s going to be wondering where we are. It’s time to go.

Aw-ww! That’s the response you hope to hear from someone you’re trying to teach anything to when it’s time to call it a day. Aw-ww, in at least two syllables.

Weeks went by between our trips to the dock, but my sister and I never lost track of whose turn it was to carry the stringer back to the car and triumphantly in through the kitchen door. Down in the basement, Dad would spread out yesterday’s Pittsburgh Press and we’d get to watch as he cleaned the catch. Too small to bother filleting, he’d scale the fish and gut them and remove their heads, so that by the age of six I knew enough about fish anatomy to pass a biology exam. We’d even open their stomachs to examine the dragonfly larvae, midge pupae and other tiny animals they fed on.

Upstairs in the kitchen, Mom made them Appalachian style – rolled in cornmeal seasoned with salt and pepper and fried golden brown and so crisp their tails were like potato chips. The three of us unerringly remembering whose plate the catch-of-the-day belonged on – usually a nice perch. Bread and butter and a big salad of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers from my dad’s garden rounded out the meal. Those summertime meals of fresh fish and garden salad are far and away my favorite childhood food memory.

Eight-Weights: Alaska Peninsula Summer Trek – Going Off the Grid for Salmon, Trout, Char, Grayling and Pike

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Early last Friday morning we put the finishing touches on packing for this summer’s (potentially epic) fishing-centric trek on the upper Alaska Peninsula. Two Salsa Fargo bikes equipped with semi-fat tires, to be loaded with Big Agnes Rattlesnake Mountain Glow tent, down sleeping bags, Alpacka pack rafts, tenkara rods, fly rods, freeze-dried camping food, cookware, compact stove, minimal camera gear, blank writing journals, waders, rain gear, and (for me) just one extra pair of underwear. We then borrowed a pickup truck drove the gear to Chignik Lake’s airstrip and loaded it onto a Lake Clark Cessna headed for Nondalton.

I’ll turn 58 on this trip and I’m a little apprehensive – not as sanguine in my physical endurance and strength as I was in the old days. For the first time in my life, I am aware of physical limitations in a way I’ve never before felt those limitations. But I want to get out there and try this and see if I can handle it. I think I can handle it. If it comes together all right, this trip will set the stage for the next several summers. Fortunately, Barbra has greeted the prospects this summer holds forth with unbridled enthusiasm sufficient to douse my doubts. “Pace yourself,” a friend advised, and although that two-word phrase is anathema to the way I’ve gone about things most of my life, I have to concede that on this series of treks, it’s probably the most prudent recommendation I could receive.

Iliamna Lake is the epicenter of the world’s most prolific Sockeye Salmon nursery.

Nondalton is a perfect starting point. The Newhalen River threads together some of Alaska’s (and by extension, the World’s) most storied fly-fishing waters, including Lake Clark upriver and legendary Iliamna Lake downriver. Along with their nearly innumerable tributaries, the entire watershed constitutes the world’s greatest Sockeye Salmon spawning grounds and nursery. Oh, there are kings, silvers, pinks and chums, char, grayling, white fish and pike, too – and at the right time and place lots of them and large ones. But the keystone species is the Sockeye, and it’s because of these millions of spawning salmon and the ocean-borne nutrients they carry upriver each summer that the watershed is home to some of highest numbers of large rainbow trout found anywhere. Trout 18” and up are common. How far up? The Kvichak River, which flows out of Iliamna and into Bristol Bay, gave up a 23-pounder in 1999, and while there don’t seem to be as many super large trout as in the past, fish well over 20 inches are still abundant, as are large Dolly Varden Char, Arctic Grayling, Northern Pike and Lake Trout. In fact, when I ticked off a list of modestly-sized personal bests for the species we’ll be targeting this summer, our friend Jerry, who talked us into this trek, kind of laughed and replied, “You’re gonna break all those records right here on Six Mile.”

After exploring the Six Mile Lake area, the possibilities are practically limitless. Virtually every lake, stream and river in this part of the Bristol Bay watershed is a world class angling destination. So it’s almost a given that we’re going to catch a lot of fish. And camp, and hike, and pick wild berries, and raft, and swat mosquitoes and see bears and moose and cap an especially good day with a bourbon toast from a small flask a fair distance from anything that looks like civilization.

But it’s not all gonna be blueberry patches and easy trout. We might have to bush-whack into some places, and we won’t use guides or take float planes in to the best water. We’re determined to make the fishing our own, and that will mean fishless stretches at times as we explore, and it might mean tough going at times. That’s the price for getting off the beaten path.

If we each get a few personal bests this summer and have a few fish-after-fish-after-fish days, a few memorable wildlife sightings, a few meals of freshly caught fish… If we learn a few things, experience a few new things…

It’ll be a great summer.

And with that, the staff of CutterLight is off on vacation for blessed weeks on end with no phone service, no computers and no news. Look for accounts of our adventures when we resume publishing toward the end of the summer.

Beading the Dolly Varden… And how Did they get that name?

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

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Spawning salmon attract opportunistic Dolly Varden char looking for easy pickin’s of fresh roe. It’s the perfect opportunity to grab a fly-rod, a handful of beads and hit the water.

Chignik Lake’s main road begins at the dirt airstrip on the west side of the village and terminates at the riverside boat landing to the east. The 3.3 miles in-between, often marked with clumps of bear scat, moose tracks and even wolf prints, runs past a tiny post office on the ground floor of the postmaster’s home and a clinic only occasionally manned by itinerate healthcare providers who fly in from other villages. Along the way, the mostly dirt road winds past a school with a total enrollment of 19 students, a tiny Greek Orthodox church, a community center and a sparse collection of houses that are home to the village’s 50 or so inhabitants. Patches of salmonberries, alders and fireweed edge most of the road, which at one point crosses a crystalline stream that fills up with spawning char each fall.

The only practical ways in and out of the village are by bush plane or boat. And so, when a friend told us he’d be flying into the sister village of Chignik Bay and suggested we come down for some fishing, we needed to hitch a ride on someone’s skiff in order to make the 16-mile run down the Chignik River, through Chignik Lagoon, around the headlands and into Chignik Bay. Fortunately this didn’t present a problem, as we’re virtually the only two people in the village who don’t have an aluminum Lund v-hull with an outboard motor – the Chignik Lake version of a pickup truck

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Chignik resident Clinton Boskofsky runs his 18’ aluminum skiff down the Chignik River on a sunshine-filled day in early fall.

A few bald eagles eyed us cooly from bank-side perches as the skiff bounced down the remote river toward the Alaska Gulf. Two weeks ago on this same river I’d seen a handful of bears drawn by thousands of sockeye salmon teaming in the shallows, their bodies crimson red, heads moss green. But today salmon were scarce and the bears had moved up into the feeder streams where the fish were still spawning.

Gradually, the brisk fall air took on a familiar briny scent as we approached the lagoon. The bones of an old gillnetter fishing boat rested along the southern shoreline and an abandoned cannery came into view on the opposite side, vestiges of a not-so-distant past.

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“Love this smell!” Barbra called out over the steady hum of the outboard.

“Tide’s out a little, flat calm. No bears I guess, but it’s a good day to see otters!” I called back.

Sure enough, as we broke into open water, a raft of sea otters popped up their heads to give us a curious look.

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Puffins, kittiwakes, murres, gulls, cormorants, auklets and leaping salmon were also in the mix of wildlife as we hung a right, arced around the headlands and cruised into Chignik Bay. Surrounded by a semi-circle of mountains, the evening light over the village was fading fast. As the bow of the skiff nosed into the gravel beach with a metallic crunch, our friend Jerry walked down to greet us.

“Any fish up in the creek?” I asked him.

“I dunno,” he replied. “I just got here myself. Haven’t been up to look yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow morning.”

Work in Mongolia having pulled us away from our adopted state for the past two years, it had been awhile since we’d last seen our old friend. With lots of drinking… er… catching up to do, we ended up getting a late start the next day. Fortunately, it wouldn’t matter. If salmon were in the stream the Dollies would be close behind, sucking up any loose eggs that failed to get buried in the spawning redds. The char wouldn’t be fussy as long as we showed them beads approximating the size and color of the roe they were feeding on.

Shortly after lunch the next day, the three of us were standing on a bridge at the edge of Chignik Bay village overlooking Indian Creek’s pellucid waters. A month ago, this very stretch of the stream had been thick with spawning pink salmon. That run was over. With and without polarized sunglasses, we strained our eyes hoping to catch a tell-tale flash or shadow below the rippled surface.

“There’s a salmon!” I looked to see where Jerry was pointing.

“Oh, yeah!” Barbra exclaimed. “There’s a few!”

Mildly irritated that I still hadn’t found the fish, I narrowed my eyes and kept looking. Gradually, almost magically, some of the multi-colored stream bed rocks I’d been staring at began to reveal themselves as animate objects, little light-gray torpedoes casting faint shadows. Pinks. Looking more closely, other, smaller shapes subtly shifting in the current materialized. Dollies.

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Colored rocks below a rippled surface paint a mosaic on Indian Creek.

Each of us rigged up with a standard 9’ leader terminating in a 5x tippet, threaded on an egg-sized bead somewhere in the orangish-red spectrum, tied on a small black hook, pinched down the barb and affixed a hot pink, fingernail-sized strike indicator a few feet above the egg. A translucent silicon stopper inserted into the bead would allow us to keep the egg in place a couple of inches above the hook.

Fishing beads is fairly straightforward. When salmon spawn, the female uses her caudal fin – her tail – to dig out a depression in the stream’s gravel bed. This nest is called a redd. As she deposits her eggs, a male releases milt. The female then moves upstream and again uses her tail to push gravel over the fertilized eggs. Thus buried, the eggs will remain well oxygenated and safe from predators until they hatch in the coming months.

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Male Dolly Varden in brilliant fall spawning colors. Note the orange bead “egg” just below its jaws. In a few hours of fishing covering two days, the three of us caught dozens and dozens of char from 10 to 19 inches. We kept 10 fish for the kitchen – a few small fish to charcoal grill whole and three larger fish for other recipes. (See Rustic Char and Dolly Varden Shioyaki.)

But there are invariably eggs that drift out of the redd before they can be buried. Mergansers, gulls, sculpins, trout, char and ravens are among a host of opportunists that seek out these loose eggs. On Indian Creek we encountered American dippers, a fascinating songbird able to hop into a stream and walk along the bottom, availing themselves of drifting roe.

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Dollies are fall spawners and the abdomen of this beautifully-marked female is swelled with her own eggs.

The objective is to present the bead so that it gently bounces along the bottom as a natural egg would. A cast straight upstream or quartering upstream is generally most effective. When a char intercepts the bead, the strike indicator floating with the current will hesitate. With a small, sharp, barbless hook, simply lifting the rod while tightening the line is sufficient to achieve a hookup.

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This male Indian Creek Dolly Varden was stuffed to the gills with fresh salmon roe. Note the red dot on the egg closest to the Dolly; it indicates that the egg has been fertilized.

The next morning, with a few hours to spare before our boat ride was scheduled to show up, we decided to have another go at Indian Creek. This time we wanted to give our tenkara rods a try. It’s origins in Japan, tenkara angling exemplifies simplicity at its finest.

There is no reel. Instead, a long line is attached directly to the tip of a light, delicate but strong, telescoping rod. Our tenkara rods are about 12 feet in length but telescope down to a mere 21 inches. The entire set-up weighs less than 2 1/2 ounces. Rated for a maximum tippet strength of about five pound test, these rods are perfect for hiking and stream exploring in pursuit of fish of a few inches up to a couple of pounds. Between the long rod, a slightly longer line and an outstretched arm, a cast of nearly 30 feet is achievable – plenty long enough to cover the water on streams, small rivers and even the weedy margins of a lakeshore.

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Jerry took this stunning female Dolly on a tenkara rod and a bead. Rod, line, lure and pristine water… Angling doesn’t get any more beautifully simple.

Fishing over the same water we’d hit the previous day, we expected fewer fish. Happily, that wasn’t the case. In fact, our two largest char came on the tenkara rods. And for the second day in a row, except for a pair of dippers and a belted kingfisher, we had the stream to ourselves.

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So how did this fascinating member of the trout and char clan come to be called “Dolly Varden?” Glad you asked.

It seems that sometime in the 1870’s anglers on northern California’s McCloud River were catching a species of brightly-colored trouty-looking fish. Admiring the brilliant spots and colorful markings, the anglers called them “calico trout” after the floral-patterned cloth. A group of fisherman were looking over a catch of these “calico trout” and lamenting that there wasn’t a better name for them when a 16-year old girl, the daughter of local resort owners, happened along. The girl had been reading Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in which there is a character by the name of Dolly Varden. This character was named for the feminine fashion of the time, a muslin dress worn over a brightly colored petticoat. In fact, the girl had recently received a dress and petticoat in that very style. “Why not call them ‘Dolly Varden?’” she suggested.

The name stuck, and so this most colorful salmonid came to known by a most colorful name.

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The eponymous Dolly Varden fashion of the 1870s…

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…And an exquisite specimen of Salvalinus malma – the Dolly Varden char.

Back in the skiff heading home, a squall packing icy rain hit us square in the face as we rounded the cape. We pulled jacket hoods tight and hunkered down, following Clinton’s directions to shift our weight against changes in wind and current in order to keep the boat on an even keel. No complaints. A few fish iced down in a small tub, time on a beautiful piece of water, a friendship renewed… And we never take for granted how fortunate we are to live in this land of staggering abundance.

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Sleeves rolled up and arms elbow deep in Indian Creek’s frigid waters, I snapped a few frames not sure what, if anything, I’d get. There appear to be four species of salmon as well as a couple of dozen char in this shot.

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A basic bead kit includes a box with a few beads and a few short-shank hooks, silicon toothpicks (if you’ve been using wood, try silicon), and a card of self-adhesive strike indicators. (There are 12 pink, fingernail-sized self-adhesive foam squares on this card.) The strike indicators can be slid up and down the line depending on water depth. The bead, pegged to the line with a silicon toothpick (inserted and trimmed close to the egg) can also be slid. Note that the egg is affixed about two inches above the hook. This positioning ensures that fish are consistently and neatly hooked in or just outside the jaw, minimizing injury. A pack of small split-shot sinkers to keep the egg near the bottom is also handy. There’s still one more step before this rig is finished – can you spot it?

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Look Ma! No reel! Determined fighters, even small Dollies put a nice arc in a tenkara rod. My connection with genus Salvalinus, the chars, began when I was about seven years old and caught my first brook trout, S. fontinalis, on Minister Creek in Pennsylvania. It’s an arbitrary thing, I suppose, to have a favorite fish, but if I had to name mine…

Nervous Water and Red Salmon

Posted on August 9, 2016 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

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Looked out the window this morning and saw nervous water on the lake. Skipped breakfast. Three hens and a buck. I’ll cure eggs for ikura later today. Shioyaki salmon for dinner tonight. Beginning of our second week in Chignik Lake, Alaska.

Back on the Water: Upriver Grayling in Mongolia

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

It felt good to finally get out on water. Prospecting for these handsomely marked grayling on a small river in Mongolia took us back to prospecting for trout in small waters in other places.

Nearly as translucent as water and marked like colored glass, the grayling’s dorsal fin…

By mid-September, autumn has come to Mongolia’s steppes and mountains. By the end of September, we’ll have had our first snows.

Sluggish with cold and dark with Autumn, one of the year’s last grasshoppers.

Yellows, golds and browns mixed with the blue-green of evergreens, predominant fall colors across this land. Here and there a touch of crimson.

Feet up. Water pours across the floorboards of the doorless Polaris Ranger. One of several crossings.

Not everyone made it.

Stringing up. Something between rumor and someone’s good authority sent us up to these headwaters, prospecting.

I stuck my camera into the icy water to get a photo of rocks speckled with caddis casings.

We encountered sporadic blue-winged olive mayflies. Rocks we flipped revealed caddis and stoneflies, a few loaches and this dragonfly nymph.

Possible water, but not promising. Larch trees yellowed by frost-laced mornings, pools in shaded feeder streams iced over.

It feels like a lifetime ago that we were on our boat in Alaska, filling coolers with a years’ worth of ocean bright salmon, halibut and rockfish to sustain us through months in the Arctic Bush. Back to roots – a fly rod, a small river, drifting nymphs and dries. Bone satisfying to once again feel the weight of a fish. Could be a rainbow stream in Colorado, cutthroat water in Oregon, a brookie creek in Pennsylvania or a yamame stream in Japan. It all feels like home.

Barbra’s first grayling and her first fish in Mongolia.

We hiked and drove and hiked some more. At last we found the water I’d been looking for – the right depth, the right flow, the right-sized boulders breaking up the bottom at the right intervals. And there in front of us, tens of fish materialized out of nothing – out of water as clear as air – porpoising and splashing across a run maybe 60 feet long and half that width in pursuit of something tiny emerging from the water. Several times these grayling rocketed completely out of the water as they threw themselves at our mayfly patterns. A number of times we were both hooked up, simultaneously.

Eight inches or eighty pounds… It never gets old. The grayling were still feeding when we left, reluctantly, the sun low behind clouds.

A backward look…

Grayling. Grayling water. Mongolia…

Sautéed Salmon Roe

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

On the East Coast, shad roe is a celebrated springtime delicacy. In the Pacific Northwest, a similar side dish or an amuse bouche can be made from the immature eggs of ocean-caught salmon.

Fresh roe from ocean-caught salmon has a creamy texture and taste with an essence as fresh as the sea. At this stage the small, unripe eggs are firmly held together inside two separate egg sacs and lend themselves to being sautéed over low heat.

Once the egg sacs have been removed from the salmon and cleaned, preparation is easy. We like to keep it simple so that the delicate flavor of the eggs comes through: a little olive oil or butter, garlic clove sliced fine and a dash or two of salt is all you need. Keep the heat low so that the eggs don’t pop and cook the eggs through till they become opaque. Add a dash of sherry or white wine if desired.

A glass of Champagne, a sparkling wine from California, or an Italian Prosecco along with an amuse bouche featuring sautéed roe make an elegant start to to a special dinner. Larger roe sacs can be presented as an entrée similar to the manner in which shad roe is often served.

For an easy method for curing ripe salmon roe into beautiful, sushi-grade ikura, see Ikura: Curing Salmon Eggs

Sockeye Salmon off the Beaten Path: Dipnetting on Alaska’s Copper River

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

A two-mile hike into the canyon, a scramble down a steep bank, a piece of river with no one else in sight, and a run of red salmon hugging the shoreline, pushing upstream, heading home…

Chalky-brown with glacial silt and bank erosion, the broad river sweeps by below, swift, powerful, wild. If we’ve timed it right, the piece of water we’ve chosen to fish will be full of sockeyes. Fireweed has just begun to bloom, and the forest trail above the river is lined with bluebells and pink wild roses.

Barbra fishes an eddie where the fish swim close to the bank on their journey to spawning grounds further upstream.

This is not the fishing of hackle and thread carefully presented on graceful, arcing casts, nor even of Pixie spoons heaved out and fluttered through clear riffles. The net our friend Nathaniel Wilder has loaned us measures roughly three feet across and four feet long and is attached to a 12-foot handle. The rig is cumbersome, made more so by the surging tug of the current and we take turns bracing the handle against a slate rock outcropping to keep it steady in the river’s flow. When a fish hits, the net comes to life.

With a salmon in the net, the scramble for solid footing begins.

Left: On average the hens are smaller, but the roe is a delicacy.

They come one, two and even three at a time and average six pounds apiece. The limit is 30, and it’s quickly apparent it won’t take long to put that many on the bank. A small, ice-cold stream cascading down the canyon wall provides the perfect place to clean the catch. We’re happy to have packed in a scrap of wood to serve as a filleting table.

The two-mile hike back to our camper, our backpacks loaded with 90 pounds of fish between the two of us is work, but a good kind of work. Back home, we’ll smoke and can the bright red fillets. The roe we’ve kept will be cured and made into ikura.

Brilliant red-orange and marbled with fat, these sockeye fillets are ready to be brined and smoked, seasoned and broiled, grilled on a cedar plank, or sliced thin and served as sashimi. As per standard practice in Japanese sushi shops, we freeze salmon (and other fish) for at least 24 hours prior to preparing raw.

Warm weather in Alaska has meant quickly melting ice and high water.

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Above left: Bluebells, horsetail ferns and salmonberries take over the ruins of an old train trestle. Right: Dense patches of wild rose perfume the air along the trail. Below: We hiked out of the canyon at midnight, just as the Alaskan sun was setting.

For an excellent recipe for brining and smoking salmon, see: Smoked Salmon with Soy Sauce and Brown Sugar Brine

For an easy ikura curing method, see: Ikura: Curing Salmon Eggs

Smelt Smoked or Fried (Eulachon, Hooligan or Candlefish)

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Eulachon are packed with oil when they begin their spawning run – roughly 15% of their body weight. Dried, they can be lit and will burn like a candle, which is why early explorers in North American called them candlefish. The term eulachon is derived from the Chinook language.

When the hooligan are making their spring-time run in the Pacific Northwest, dip-netters from Oregon to Alaska gather along the banks of their natal streams and rivers to scoop up a few pounds for the pan and the smoker. An anadromous species, these members of Osmeridae (the smelt family) spend most of their lives in the ocean and ascend the rivers of their birth to spawn and die. At this time, they don’t feed, so dip-netting is the best way to harvest them.

Our friend Krystin scoops up a netful of hooligan from a small stream near Seward.

Fiddlehead ferns, fireweed shoots or asparagus lightly sautéed in olive oil and finished with a squirt of lemon make a fitting accompaniment for a meal of freshly caught smelt. One of our favorite cooking methods for the fish themselves is to roll them in cornmeal, wrap them in bacon, fry them whole and serve them wrapped in a crisp leaf of Romain lettuce – a lettuce-smelt taco. (See Bacon-Wrapped Smelts for more on this recipe.)

Right: When the fish are in, it can be possible to catch them by hand. It took Krystin a few minutes to grab these fish one at a time.

Another great way to enjoy hooligans is to smoke them, and that’s the way our friends Bixler and Krystin recently prepared them. They use a commercially prepared dry rub, but making your own is easy enough. Typical dry rubs feature about one cup of non-iodized salt to four cups of brown sugar. Garlic, ginger, cloves, nutmeg and allspice are among seasonings commonly added to give brines more flavor. Simply pack the fish in the brine in a glass baking dish, place in the fridge for a day or so, rinse the fish, pat the fish dry with paper towels and smoke for about eight hours. (See Alaska Fast Food: Smoked Hooligans at Alaskagraphy.)

The bones of cooked or smoked smelt are soft, and many people (including us) eat them whole from head to tail. Gravid females (those with ripe roe) are our favorites.

Zaru soba – cold buckwheat noodles – is a perfect dish for the hot weather we’ve been having lately. Topped with a smoked smelt from the refrigerator, this dish can be garnished with salmon roe, nori or served as is. You can used a store-bought noodle dipping sauce or make your own with a little rice vinegar, a little soy sauce, a little brown sugar, ice-cold water and a sprinkling of sesame seeds.