weird thing that lives in the sea.

I really really really don't like shrimp. I guess those of you who enjoy them on your salad are sane, moral, kind people, but I think shrimp are creepy as all get out. Crunchy. Slimy. Spidery. The only thing grosser(est) that I can think of right now are the fleas I picked off my cat's forehead with a comb and drowned in soapy water this morning.


But, all that aside, sounds like I should probably get a license and go fishing for them...

Image source: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

Seafood processor opens doors in South Bend for shrimp seasonBy KATIE WILSON
June 23, 2014
The Chinook Observer

SOUTH BEND — Jessie’s South Bend, an expansion of Jessie’s Ilwaco Fish Company, is up and running and taking advantage of the collapse of an East Coast pink shrimp fishery.
With Washington in the middle of one of the most abundant shrimp seasons it has likely ever seen, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, fishers and processors are feeling confident and pursuing certification that could allow them to break into overseas markets.

Jessie’s, along with processors Pacific Seafood and Ocean Gold, are pursing MSC certification, the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council’s set of standards to indicate sustainable fishing. They began last year, said Don Alber, president of Alber Seafoods which acquired Jessie’s this year.

This month, Jessie’s began processing ocean pink shrimp at the former East Point Seafood facility in South Bend. Production had been on hold until the Department of Ecology could reissue a required water quality permit that had been held by former tenant, Joel Van Ornum, owner of Dungeness Development, who was evicted from the building earlier this year.

Ocean pink shrimp, Pandalus jordani — the small shrimp Jessie’s is cooking and peeling, popular in salad and other seafood dishes — is similar to the East Coast’s dwindling northern shrimp, Pandalus borealis. Think of them as cousins, though jordani tends to be smaller, sweeter and more moist. (Northern shrimp live in the Pacific Ocean, too, but are not commercially harvested.)

For the last four years, the East Coast’s borealis seasons have been cut short or restricted. In 2011, the season closed early after fishers landed 14.1 million pounds instead of the recommended limit of 5.3 million.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) declared a moratorium on the northern shrimp fishery this year after it showed signs of collapse in 2013. A “Status of the Stocks” document released by ASMFC last month stated the fishery was “overfished and overfishing is occurring.”
But bad news for northern shrimp could mean good news for shrimp trawlers and processors in Oregon and Washington.

“Less shrimp always helps,” said Brad Pettinger, director of the Oregon Trawl Commission. He estimates that the global supply of shrimp, while not quite half of what it used to be, is approaching that number fast, which makes the Pacific Northwest’s current abundance a valuable commodity.

“This is the ‘good old days,’” Pettinger said. “This fishery has never been better.”

‘Unknown but assumed stable’ 
As of July 12, Washington shrimp fishers had landed 17.8 million pounds of shrimp. Total landings vary from year to year, and fishers normally see a final number that’s closer to 9 million pounds though last year fishers landed approximately 13.2 pounds. The average ex-vessel price per pound has also been climbing, from $0.27 a pound in 2002 to $0.47 in 2012.

There is no limit, no quota, on the amount of shrimp fishers can haul in. And though there is abundance now, the shrimp fishery is like any other: Weather and other factors can mean the difference between a great season or a bad one.

Of concern this season is the prediction of an El Nino year. The shrimp need cold water to thrive, said Lorna Wargo, coastal marine fisheries manager for WDFW. She has been involved with the shrimp fishery for about 15 years.

“An El Nino could turn this season on a dime,” she said.

And, she added, “there’s really no way to assess the shrimp population directly.” They’re either there or they aren’t.

WDFW’s informational webpage about the fishery simply states, “Pink shrimp abundance off the coast of Washington is unknown but assumed stable.”

Marketing shrimpWhile the collapse of the East Coast fishery may have opened the door for West Coast shrimp to find a wider market, Christa Svensson, who handles sales and marketing at Bornstein Seafoods in Astoria, is cautious.

“I think there are a lot of positive signs, but there are some inherent challenges,” she said.
The two most basic hurdles, as she sees them, are the customers’ familiarity (or lack of) with the West Coast product and the story the industry can tell about the product. Also, to get into almost any European market, MSC certification is a must, Svensson said.

“It’s like any market,” she said. “You can go into most markets, it’s just how successful will you be there? I think there is room to grow but it will be industry driven. I don’t think it will be only fishermen or only processors. It will be all of us together.”

The shrimp fishery in Oregon is MSC certified and, historically, larger than Washington’s, bringing in an average of 26 million pounds of shrimp every year for the last 31 years. It is regulated and organized, and has been for years.

In Washington, the fishery has been managed more through gear regulations. A mandatory logbook program, discontinued in 1993, has since been reinstated and beginning in 2010, federal observers came aboard. But their priority is the groundfish fishery; they aren’t on every shrimp boat and they don’t go on every trip.

Jobs for South Bend 
Jessie’s South Bend facility has brought a much-needed spark of development to the city. South Bend has struggled since the economic downturn and the decline of the timber industry. Now, Mayor Julie Struck is encouraged by the number of jobs the seafood company has brought to the community: 60, currently, with the possibility of more in the future.
“That’s almost twice what was employed there before,” said Dee Roberts, city clerk and treasurer.

Many of the new hires had worked for Dungeness Development and lost their jobs when Van Ornum was evicted. Van Ornum filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May. According to South Bend city officials, East Point property owner Odin Bendiksen and Alber, he still allegedly owes thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.

Jessie’s South Bend will be a seasonal operation for now, focused on shrimp processing, but Alber hopes to add other products to the mix eventually. He plans to add salmon products at the Ilwaco location this year. Jessie’s hasn’t been involved in making salmon products before, he said, but Alber Seafoods has bought fish from tribal fisheries and on the Columbia River for a number of years.

He thinks it’s a good year to jump into the salmon processing business, too. With a 2 million fish run predicted for fall Chinook and coho, “the other processors are going to be overwhelmed,” he said.

What I've been writing recently

This week (it's a long one. Copyright: 2014, Chinook Observer). (I love it when the dateline for a story is something like "PACIFIC OCEAN," "MIDDLE OF THE ATLANTIC" or, in this case, "COLUMBIA RIVER"): 

(image from: http://www.montereyfish.com/pages/methods/p_seining.html)

New salmon fishery will test seine gear
Switch away from gillnets is supposed to make it easier to separate wild and hatchery fish

COLUMBIA RIVER — A small fleet of purse and beach seine-equipped boats is set to begin fishing the Lower Columbia River, from Buoy 10 to Beacon Rock, in August as part of a newly created research fishery.

However, after several years of contracting with fishers to test this gear outside of a commercial fishery setting, Oregon and Washington’s departments of fish and wildlife say the only “reasonable” release mortality rates they’ve seen for the seine-caught fish were for steelhead.

With plans to phase out gill nets on the Columbia River, the switch to seines is meant to lessen impacts on wild-spawning salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act. Hatchery salmon are marked by removing a small fin and may be harvested by fishermen, while unmarked salmon are supposed to be returned to the river unharmed.

But according to numbers crunched by the states’ technical advisory group, the U.S. v. Oregon Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), only 8.3 percent of steelhead died after being caught in beach seines and released, but 34.3 percent of Chinook salmon and 38.4 percent of coho caught in the same nets died.

“If those numbers are what we’re faced with, that’s pretty high,” said Ron Roler, of WDFW. “That’s pretty difficult to work with.”

Purse seine mortality was only slightly better with 3.3 percent steelhead mortality, 22.5 percent Chinook mortality and 28.9 percent coho mortality.

“I think the state guys would have been much happier if we were seeing Chinook and coho release mortality rates in the same neighborhood of less than 10 percent,” said Stuart Ellis, of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and chairman of TAC.

Currently, gillnet fishers in the small spring selective fishery report 14.7 percent release mortality rates for tangle net-caught Chinook and 40 percent mortality for large mesh-caught Chinook, said Jim Wells, an Astoria-based commercial fisherman and president of Salmon For All.

“But our catch is very small,” he said to explain the rates.

Beach seines are hauled up onto a shoreline and were a prime feature of the internationally famous horse-seine fishery that once made West Sand Island some of the most desirable real estate on the West Coast. Purse seines — so called because their opening is drawn up and closed like a string purse trapping fish inside — are operated from a fishing vessel. But many gillnet boats are unsuited for adaptation to seining equipment.

A new fishery

Last week, the Oregon and Washington Departments of Fish and Wildlife used a lottery system to select 10 fishers to participate in the research fishery. Though fishers can opt out of the program, the departments hope to have four purse seine boats and six beach seine boats operating on the river in August and September.

Fishers can sell what they catch, but the fish they land won’t carve a chunk out of the catchable fish available to the regular fleet. When the research boats kill wild fish protected under the Endangered Species Act in the normal course of fishing operations, those “impacts” won’t come from the regular commercial fleet. Instead, they will be taken as research impacts. In general, only 2 percent of harvested fish may be from among ESA-protected runs.

Also, before a boat can go out and fish on the days and during the times the departments announce, it must have a department observer on board.

“It’s under the microscope,” Roler said. “Even though it’s open, it won’t be a free-for-all.”

Since 2009 and 2010, the states have contracted with individual fishermen to use seines and fish traps: “alternative commercial fishing gear.” Though such gear has been used in the past, it is currently illegal to use seines on the Columbia River outside of the states’ program. But as Oregon’s Gov. John Kitzhaber pushed to phase out the use of gillnets on the main stem of the Columbia River, this alternative gear is seen as the likely future for commercial fishers.

Which is worrisome to fishers who have participated in the states’ program since the beginning, or who have yet to try the gear at all.

The program is working under “adaptive management,” which means, says Roler, that if the fishery isn’t working the way it’s set up, “you adapt and make changes to make it work.”

But fishers wonder what the plan will be if it turns out the fishery doesn’t work at all. What if release mortality rates remain too high?

“I don’t know,” Roler said. “That’s something the Fish and Wildlife Commission would have to figure out.”

Seines versus gillnets

Long-time local fisherman Steve Gray and other fishers believe the push toward seine gear and away from gillnets is political, driven by sports fishing interests, and will not actually help conserve protected fish. And, given the mortality rates related to seining, they argue that gillnets are better at helping fishers avoid particular fish.

With gillnets, fishers can size their gear by 1/4 of an inch and even 1/8 of an inch, Gray said. This allows targeting of specific species, runs and ages of fish. In recent years, gillnetters have been required to have recovery boxes on board, in which wild salmon that are netted may regain strength before being returned to the river.

Gray also argues that switching to seine gear could disrupt sports fisheries, unnecessarily pitting sports and commercial fishers against each other. Over the years, gillnet fishers have worked to fish at times and in areas that don’t conflict as much with sports fishers, he said.

Seining is a daytime activity, Roler agreed, and seiners would have to use some of the same beaches and areas favored by sports fishermen.

“There will probably have to be some closures,” he said. But, he added, that’s why they’re starting small, with just 10 fishers, rather than the estimated 170 active licenses for gillnet fishers on the Columbia River.

“If you jump right into it with a full fleet, you’re learning on the fly,” Roler said. “With this, we can take steps and learn what we need to do by having a smaller fishery. There’s so much data to collect.”

Costs of conversion

Gray also believes the seines, which require a new set of gear and at least a three-person crew, could kick fishers with fewer resources, or older fishers who may not be able to keep up physically with the heavy seine gear, out of the fishing business entirely.

Gray’s son, Lance Gray, is one of the fishers selected for the research fishery. When he returns from fishing in Alaska and purchases a permit for the fishery, he will likely use beach seines.

Lance Gray has participated in the program from the beginning, reasoning, his father said, “At least I can go look at it, try it and learn what there is to learn.”

Still, the family has other boats and can turn to those if the seine experiment is not profitable. They are lucky, Steve Gray said. Other fishers may not have that option.

It’s going to be expensive for everyone, Ellis said, adding, “It’s kind of a big deal to start a fishery with such intensive monitoring.”

To provide monitoring, Ann Stephenson of WDFW said Washington will hire six scientific technicians; Oregon will hire three.

It is unlikely the technicians will be full-time, but they could make $13.94 to $18.02 an hour depending on experience and qualifications. The states will also have to pay for any training and have already paid for the contracts with fishers in past years and for three years worth of studies to examine mortality rates and feasibility, Stephenson said.

small town, 1

When I first moved here, the first person I met was a guy I think was named Richard and he was both dying of cancer (maybe) and trying to find, not a publisher, but a promising young (preferably male) person to type up his manuscript, an experimental poetic song-cycle-style fictional novelistic/biographical trilogy documenting the spirit quest and coming of age of a young man in (probably) the '70s. I'd see Richard most mornings, briefcase and ratty ponytail, hunched in front of a coffee shop scribbling. An unspecific Mob was searching for him, he told me. He figured the last place they'd look was the coast because who goes to the coast? No one important, he concluded. And he, knowing nod, was important, albeit only to a small scummy underworld in one of L.A.'s less interesting poor neighborhoods. It all tied back, he said, to a girl though the details had become foggy.

Now it's five years later. I caught sight of Richard in mid-October while I was eating sushi. He looked the same, but his surroundings have undergone a curse-removal transformation. The fact I was eating sushi in what used to be such a 'Merican town is one sign. I watched "Beauty and the Beast" the other day so I'm up on the curse-removal transformations.

Talk to anyone who lived here before the early 2000s and you'll understand some holy, good-fairy rain has fallen on this place turning all the Gothic revival architecture sparkly white -- cherubs sprouting everywhere, though in this case cherubs look a lot more like trendy Portland (think: piles of old books no one reads arranged on shelves too high to reach and a general wash of decor culled from "antique" stores... lots of hardware and rust and chipped paint, which might actually have been painted on and then purposefully sanded back to make it authentic by which we mean truthful? by which we achieve salvation in our times? Quinoa.)

This summer someone in New York (I think) wrote an article about the town, mentioned the pub where I work and said something like, "Wow. You saw all these people drinking beer and wearing flannel shirts and they weren't hipsters! Their flannel stood for something...like lumber or whatever..."

Bad news. None of that flannel stood for anything. It was false flannel. Those were tourists. Craft beer tourists, but tourists none the less. They were wearing flannel because that's what people do these days and they were here doing that because this place is no longer scary. Its buildings no longer look like remnants of an air raid blackout. There are things to do here besides overdose or dwindle into poverty, although both activities are still options. Richard has became an anomaly where he used to be the cocaine-heroin addled norm.

Secret weather

This picture was yesterday morning. Fog was heavy over the rivers, but when it hit land, it thinned, sending out tendrils among the trees. 

In history (by which I mean the movie version of "Sense and Sensibility"), people talked about the weather when they weren't clever enough to come up with something else to say and were ridiculed later. But out here, weather's kind of a big deal. Weather here can mean flooding and sinking ships and the only roads in or out closed down, trapped in town with so much water in the air it feels like you could drown just by breathing deeply. And then when the sun is back, unlooked for, this place is so beautiful and you hope the tourists never find out and continue confining their invasion to the summer months. Please God let them never find out about October.

things people say to people who serve them beer

"You're a Baptist pastor's daughter."

Oddly enough, I'm not.

how to start a campfire

We couldn't find the lake and it was getting dark. The girl with bug bites on her arms about to hike down to the waterfalls we planned to visit the next morning said we could join her for a beer at the falls but she had no idea what lake we were talking about and she'd grown up in the area. If we never found it, she said, we could go to her mom's house in the valley tomorrow morning and eat pancakes with the family. We said thanks but we wanted to find the lake.

But then, driving and driving, we were down to one more hour of daylight so we gave up for the night and pulled into an old quarry where Alder trees and blackberry bushes were taking over. Someone had put together targets in the belly of the quarry, and there were empty shells all over the ground. We kept to the far edge, almost under the tree branches and pitched tents. I wandered into the trees with a hatchet to gather wood. There was a sound of water all around me, but no stream in sight in the thick forest that fell steeply away in to cliff sides and canyons. My feet sank ankle-deep into moss.

We built our fire inside a circle of stones already established by previous sharpshooters and campers, and we listened for passing cars. It was a forest shot through with old logging roads, barely maintained, and anyone might be passing by, hikers decked out in gear wanting only to experience some fresh air and quiet, or meth monsters reeling like zombies and seeking out human flesh and wallets. That's the problem with the outdoors, people are looking for quiet and an escape for all kinds of reasons.

The sun was gone and our fire made us feel safe. We watched it in silence and the night noises became familiar. That's when the live rounds started to go off. There was a firework bang and wood exploded. Sparks flew out sideways. I jumped about fifteen feet backwards. Then the forest silence closed in again while the campfire flickered and flamed innocently. We watched it. A fluke, maybe. Then it happened again. And thirty seconds later, again.

It took us about a minute to stamp out the fire and smother it with dirt and water.

The next morning showed us what the twilight and the approaching dark had hidden. The sun, already hot enough to make me sweat when I stepped from the shadows, picked out hundreds of unspent tiny bullets, glinting silver in the dust.

how to board a plane

It's almost a universal, golden and such, rule: When you are waiting for a plane, look around the boarding area and identify the person you'd least like to sit next to on the upcoming flight. Be as judgmental as you want: they are too large, too small, possibly smelly, possibly emotionally disturbed, loud, creepy, asthmatic, carrying a small child. Implore the God of your fathers, "Let me not be seated next to one such as this." End with an "Amen" as you were taught. For your Father in Heaven will listen, and then, as you stumble down the cramped airplane aisle to seat 18F, that person will invariably follow, hoist their carry-on into the overhead compartment, smile benignly at you, and say, "That's me, right there next to you."

---

The pilot on my early-morning flight out of Omaha last week was a tall, thin man who looked exactly like his co-pilot, another tall, thin man, except the pilot wore glasses. He also looked like a man who used to be allowed to smoke in the cockpit and couldn't understand why the practice had died out. At the same time, he also looked like a man who had never smoked in his life and ate his weight in spinach every morning. He was, then, a pilot to trust, capable of being all things to all people, an everyman. The flight attendants introduced him as Captain Brian.

Some pilots board their airplanes like boozers, massaging the space between their eyes and stubbing their toes against invisible barriers. They pat at their stomachs and small smiles appear and disappear on cue when flight attendants make jokes. They drag their rolling suitcases like a ball and chain. They do not make you confident you will arrive at your destination alive. Instead you (I) have visions of terrible crashes when these pilots pass out at the controls over a mid-flight scotch on the rocks, of being stranded in the Rockies forced to rely on my fellow passengers for survival. Fellow passengers are the last people you want to ever have to rely on. Half of the time they look mutinous and needy and the other half of the time, they're asleep. Survivor-types do not sleep. One eye open all the time.

---

I sat next to a guy cradling a bonsai covered in a plastic bag, a wedding favor, he said, as if apologizing. When we were coming into land, my ears wouldn't pop and my fever broke. He took one look at my sweat-covered, slightly panicked face (I kept yawning, trying to make my ears pop) and, shifting the bonsai, pulled his Kindle closer to him as though it could negate my existence.


At the airport before, TSA agents made an important announcement, "Will the person leaving their belt at the security check please retrieve it?" The TSA agents in Omaha are generally pretty nice (I swear one even called me "honey"), but it was clear from the agent's tone that if this man (or woman), this serial belt deserter, did not go claim the belt, the TSA would hunt him down and the rest of us would witness an execution by firing squad.