Herring 2012

Stephen sends this picture of pickled herring. He caught his fish on Pier 32 after my tour was over. Yum yum.

Okay. Time to put the fork in this puppy and call it done. I'm officially herring-ed out. It was too bad about the commercial fresh fish permit, but hey, you can't win 'em all. Nevertheless, it was quite a banner year for net throwers. McCovey Cove/Embarcadero, Coyote, Kincaid's, Paradise, San Quentin and even Point Richmond have all had some pretty good spawns. Only thing I didn't see was a nice Sausalito run. And what's up with Candlestick? Anybody know? I'll never forget the biggest spawn I ever saw was four years ago on Super Sunday. So hopefully that will be repeated. Though at this point I am only a spectator.

Kent sends this picture of his herring in mid grill. Learned a lot about grilling small fish this winter. The secret folks, is in wood chips and super high heat. I mean, like 900 degrees and whatnot. Haven't ever had much success pan searing Pacific herring. They always turn to mush. But a super hot grill works like a charm!

Anyway, nothing major to report here, just thought I'd share a few pix from the herring tours and crazy days in pursuit of small fishes.

Even taking into account that the folks pictured below were fishing totally irresponsibly, taking way too many fish, and possibly even selling them somewhere (what else do you do with that many fish? Feed an army?), let's stop and consider for a moment how many they actually took in two days... a robust estimate would be 1 ton. Okay maybe one and a half. 3 thousands pounds. That seems like a lot until you compare it to what a single herring boat catches in one day. Somewhere between 5 and 15 tons. And the total herring quota is what? I forget, 1,900 tons or something. At least these folks are eating them here, (males and females!) not shipping 'em all off to Japan for 200 bucks a ton. Not that I begrudge those guys their quota. At this point they're only fishing 5 percent of the projected biomass. I'm just saying... to not allow a limited commercial throw net fishery is... well... ludicrous.

Anyway... here's what it looked like out there:

McCovey Cove Jan 2012

Same day. Pier 32, Jan 2012, Champion de la Banana on the prowl

Speaking of the Champion here's 25 seconds of him (below). Which should illicit a few smiles from the regulars. Oh yeah, and BTW, that is in fact a fish checker (Ed) on his knees counting herring (in photo above). So at least part of the day's catch was entered into a database somewhere.

And that's going to do it for my herring posts. I'm done. February is four days off and you all should know what that means...

C. sordidus

And (towards the end of the month) this little guy:

S. Starski

So stay tuned! And remember there's plenty of other websites out there if you want to read about sexier game fish like Marilyn, Ava, Rita and Lana.

Kirk-out

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I missed it again! But, I was lucky enough to buy three pounds at Nijiiya grocery in Japantown. Pickled them all and prepared the roe as kazunoko. Really delicious, but I want more :)

Do you know where I can purchase some in San Francisco for less than the $6.00/lb Nijiiya was charging?

Posted by: Popothewonderdog | 02/01/2012 at 12:00 PM