Fish Smoking

Our Smokehouse

Last weekend Kyle and I tried our hand at fish smoking. We decided that we were going to try to fabricate our own little smokehouse and smoke some salmon. The week before this I went out fishing a couple times targeting salmon destined for the smokehouse. At this point in the year it is very hard to find fish that are in good shape. I ended cutting only 4 fish out of 20 some that I caught. A lot of the fish that are still alive are so moldy and deteriorated that they would not be fit for human consumption. (Although that phrase has a slightly different definition here.) I pulled one salmon out of the freezer. That was a fresh salmon caught earlier in the year. You can see the difference in the color of the flesh. The fresh salmon has a nice healthy darker orange look to it and the old salmon is a pale, sort of sickly looking color.

Old Fish and Fresh Fish

I think that we left the fish in the smokehouse for a little too long. Most of the pieces were pretty tough to chew. We also might have messed up a little bit because we put the hot plate going for about 4 hours and the we checked it only to realize that our hotplate didn't work. We had to wait until the next day to see if we could borrow a hot plate from Larry. We left the fish in the smokehouse overnight and they froze so we brought them back inside and thawed them out. We thought that it would be ok like that but that might be what caused the fish to be really tough.

Finished Product

I am trying to fashion some willow stick poles for "hooking," or ice fishing this winter. Larry showed me some of his ice fishing set ups. I concluded that they are very similar to a geppu so I decided to try to make one of my own. I cut a willow sapling that was about 4 feet long and about 3/4" thick. I then soaked it in warm water until it was flexible enough to bend into an oval shaped like a geppu. I then used my wood burner to cut a groove down the middle to hold the line. I then used some wire to make it hold its shape and then baked it in the oven for a while so that it will stay in that shape. I tried to connect the willow with superglue but it keeps coming apart. I think I am going to have to try to get some wood glue to hold it together. It won't be able to hold a lot of line like a geppu but I think it will get the job done. I also cut some willow sticks to use like the natives do. They use a willow that has a curve to it so that they can wrap the line around the ends and hold the stick in the middle.

Looking for a Willow with a Good Bend to It

Noatak hosted its first wrestling meet in many years last weekend. The middle school wrestled Kotzebue's middle school team. Some of the wrestlers had matches against their own teammates because Kotzebue's team wasn't very big. It was fairly entertaining to watch.
The weather is now mostly below freezing. All of the lakes have a solid 6 inches of ice. The river is frozen over in slow spots in the side channels but the main river is still open. On Sunday we went for a walk upriver on the side channel and I brought my fishing rod just in case. Well it wouldn't have mattered because the side channel was all frozen over with a few inches of clear ice.

Testing the Ice