Of Black, Quills and Coppers--
a spine-tingler tale of fish cleaning

Once upon a time, when I was working for a graduate student at the University of Washington at the Friday Harbor Laboratories (fish research station in the San Juan Islands near Canada) I had the wonderful task of processing fish.  Not just a few fish. Lots and lots of fish.  The study was about reefs and how fast fish re-populate them off Orcas Island.  So every two weeks the student would dive on the reef and use a pole spear to get as many fish as he could in two hours.  Usually this was 70-80 rockfish of various species, and a few kelp greenling, lingcod and assorted others.  But mostly rockfish, the ones with the BIG SPINES on the back that stick straight up when the fish gets irritated.

Once the fish were delivered to me, I got busy taking out the otoliths (ear bones) from their heads.  You can tell what species they are and how old the fish is by looking at these things.  Then I molested their intestines to look for further information you really don't want to know about. And then, oh then, it was to salvage the meat.  Now, this seems easy, just take a nice filet knife and go to work, slice, slice, whap, slice, slice and voila, great fish filet.  Fine on fish that don't have body armor that can do substantial damage to hapless humans who attempt to get at their bodies, especially in death.  The spines on these rockfish were spears, I swear two feet long, and should be classified as deadly weapons and require a permit to carry.  Two species in particular were particularly adept at causing blood to flow (mine), the Quillback and Copper Rockfish.  My recommendation is that these species are not to be attempted unless you are masochistic or suicidal or really wanting to get on the ER program for TV.

After 5 months of giving my life's blood for this job , I decided to scale down my work load and headed out to the clam beds to conduct research on cockles.  Yes, your tax dollars at work to find out such important answers as: how high can a cockle jump and how far do they travel?....but that is another story.  However, it is true that clams got style and legs.  And recently I heard rumors in B.C.ville (the comic strip) that they got arms too!

But WAIT, there is more.  I have not yet told the great fish catch story of my friends using a spear gun (the kind that looks like a crossbow for underwater use) to shoot a very, very VERY LARGE Ling Cod (it was legal back then).  To make a long story shorter, the fish, once speared was brought to shore (a 30 foot cliff on San Juan Island that I had to drag her up to get to the car to take her home). She was REALLY heavy and measured 58 inches long.

When we got the fish home we laid her out on a bench in front to the house (on the main street into Friday Harbor) since she was too big to go in the kitchen.  I proceeded to filet it.

This was no easy task.  Her mouth - well suffice it to say I could put my whole head in it.  So, after a few hours of work, she was in the fridge.  After a few hours more, we cooked some of the filet hunks.  The taste - like old newspapers left in the rain for a few days.

The moral of this story is, bigger is not always better or if you can't catch it with a hand-held pole spear or it needs a fork lift to get in the car, leave it swimming in the ocean.

Martha Jordan has way too much fun with her border collies Tucker and Ki, and bogs around after migratory water fowl in winter. She knows all about animal cookie predation and little webbed feet of baby swans.