2/20/03

A couple of weeks ago I gathered mussels along with my daughter out on the beach. It was an afternoon low minus tide and we were able to pluck the tasty bivalves just before supper time without getting our feet wet.

We gathered enough for a dinner party of eight because we had invited some friends over for a special treat. Many of our guests had never eaten mussels and none had gathered their own. I found out the trick to eating mussels for the novice is not to inspect them too closely.

My daughter, doing a careful fingernail postmortem, asked "what's this brown stuff?" One of our guests, an English professor, politely remarked that she did not think she could make mussels a regular part of her diet because "they are so... explicit."
In plainer English, the hot, steamy, pink-orange flesh of the cooked mussel looks just like a human vagina, complete with anatomically correct labia and a clitoral outcropping of freak-show proportions. To be completely frank, these cuties wouldn't be out of place in the marital aids section of any South of Market gadget shop.

Yes, it's true that the Ancients who believed in the Law of Similars testified to the aphrodisiac powers of the edible mussel. What bullshit. If any of our guests felt the urge to melt into puddles of mutual sensory exploration, they were able to restrain themselves.
No, I will not offer taste-test comparisons between steamed mussels and...let's not go there. My advice when it comes to the beginning mussel-eater is simply to pop one into your mouth and let the flavor buds roll. Let the pleasantly salty flesh melt on your tongue, watch out for the grit and don't bite down too hard. (If this sounds like newlywed counselling from Henry Miller, so be it.)

Valentine's Day marks the beginning of the end of steelhead fishing on the northcoast. We've seen some heavy rain. People were catching (and releasing, mostly) steelhead on coastal streams from Ten Mile River, the Mad, the Mattole, on up to the mighty Smith River - until the downpour Saturday night blew out the rivers. On Sunday the Navarro was high and mocha-java colored.

The big time commercial crabbers have moved on from the Ft. Bragg area to other pursuits, while sport crabbing and the small time commercial guy continue to do well. One of the proposals I often hear at fishery management hearings: there ought to be a pot limit on commercial boats, and an end to commercial crab fishing at night. Some of the high-rollers have 1000 pots or more.

Word is that coastal Assistant District Attorney Mark Kalina will be pursuing the Caito Bros. crab poaching case from both ends, in Eureka where the crabs were taken and in Ft. Bragg where they were processed.

The ban on recreational rockfishing off the Noyo shores continues. Commercial fishing for these same species is open. A $60 million buyback program for west coast trawlers is working its way through the fetid pools of Washington DC.

Enforcement, while dedicated, is hamstrung by politics from Sacramento. Not to mention the sob sister judges, like the one in Sonoma County. He gave Atticus Reynolds, who was already on probation for selling steelhead on the streets of Cloverdale that he poached from the hatchery pond at Lake Sonoma, more probation for selling abalone and poaching overlimits. Bad boy.

The predicted good weather for the February 15th salmon opener was only a tease but those few big sportfisher boats who ventured out of Noyo did land some salmon on Saturday. By noon it was a "Maytag" ocean in the agitation cycle. The Lady Irma and the Trek II got 2-3 fish per boat on Saturday. The bait we've seen in the weeks leading up to the opener disappeared. The water cleared up, too.
Commercial salmon season is closed. That crap they're selling in the supermarkets is farmed Atlantic salmon, most of it from Norway, Chile and British Columbia. It's pumped with antibiotics and you shouldn't eat it. In fact, west coast commercial salmon trollers have been warned not to touch Atlantics, the ones that have escaped from their pens, since these fish have developed resistant strains of bacteria.

In the interest of a better understanding of our global cultures, through fishing: in Kuwait, saltwater fishermen ignore the plentiful tuna and billfish and catch small pogies using handlines. They hold the line daintily with a white cotton glove and get jiggy with it... German recreational fishermen are required to pass a written test lasting three hours; it's harder to get a driver's license than get a fishing license in Germany. If I had to pass the German driver's license test, I'd still be riding horseback.