When life hands you pollock. . . .

[David Thomas]

You make fish and chips!

You guys are all about laying a dry fly on the water just so and having a rainbow trout rise to it.

Up here, fishing = filling your freezer.  Catch & Release = playing with your food.

I took my 12-year-old daughter and two friends out fishing for halibut.  It was my first time doing everything – launching, getting out there, dropping anchor, weighing anchor, getting back, docking it – on my own, using my buddy’s boat.

We should have kept the first 4-pound halibut but one guy hoped for bigger fish (I figure 4 people on the boat means we’re allowed 8 fish so almost everything is a keeper.  I’m going to insist no that next time).  And I should have gone to our usual spot for small to medium halibut and not gone further out for hoping for bigger fish.

Just as the bite was on (lunch), the bite was on (some pollock moved through).  Here’s my daughter and my fishing buddy eating and reeling:

Here’s the cooler at the end of day:

And what happened to them:

Yes, I know “chips” usually means fried potato slices, but I went with tortillas chips and guacamole.

No one noticed my Italian (or Bulgarian, Hungarian, Kuwaiti) color scheme in the dipping sauces.  Sigh.

[David Thomas]

And you try NOT to hook these when you only have 100-pound test on your reel.

[Matthew / BPL]

That looks like a fun day. I had a great time halibut and salmon fishing as a kid out of Juneau on a friend’s boat. That was probably my favorite family summer vacation of all time.

[Ken Thompson]

No malt vinegar?

[David Thomas]

KenT:  We also skip wrapping it in newspaper.  With true fish&chips, you can see the mirror image of yesterday’s headlines transferred onto your lunch.

[Ken Thompson]

Savages.

 

Looks delicious.

[brian H]

Nice David.

All thats missing is a pint of Alaskan craft brew.

[Dena Kelley]

Nice one, David! Looks delicious. Is that what pollock looks like? Never seen one.

[David Thomas]

Yeah, Dena, those are two Alaska Pollock.  Usually the largest annual catch (by tonnage) of any species in the US, almost entirely form the Bering Sea.  Much of it goes into fish sticks, fish&chips, and suriname (fake crab).  And into sea lions.  Even better when brought in on a single line, immediately put on ice, filleted and cooked that night (versus being in a net with 80,000 pounds of other fish and it taking hours to get them all processed).

[Gary Dunckel]

I’m not really a fisherman in any sense of the word, but I went halibut fishing north of Seattle with my brother once. He snagged one, got it to the surface, shot it with his .22 pistol, and handed the rod to me to pull it up into the boat. I never had to work my arms that hard. It wasn’t quite dead, but almost. It couldn’t dive, but just flailed at the surface. Trying to pull a big flat fish like that up into the boat was REALLY HARD! But it sure was tasty later. I loves me some halibut (but not the work it takes to get it to the table).

[Ben C]

Halibut is the best.  Looks like a really fun trip too.

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