St. John’s grad fishes salmon for locals
St. John’s grad gives Santa Fe a direct source for Alaskan salmon — his family’s boat
If you’re a foodie, you probably know where your rutabagas come from. Also your carrots, your goat cheese, and you may have been out to Talus Wind Ranch to look at the lambs. But if you’re a fan of salmon, and you should be, you probably have no idea who caught it or how they caught it, because the open ocean is too far to get to on a weekend.
But though you live in the desert, it’s still possible to know where your fish comes from.
Dylan Hitchcock-Lopez is a bona fide Alaskan salmon fisherman who also has ties to Santa Fe — he earned a philosophy degree last year from St. John’s College, and that’s where he found his first local customers for his fish. Soon, all Santa Fe fans will be able to purchase his family’s salmon through Beneficial Farms, a local community supported agriculture group.
Hitchcock-Lopez grew up fishing on the family boat, the Sea Miner, hauling in 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of fish every summer since he turned 16. He grew up in Sitka, a town of about 9,000 people in southeast Alaska, where the dominant industry is by far commercial fishing — people say there are three boats for every person. “The first time I went fishing I was 3 years old,” laughs HitchcockLopez. “I don’t remember it very well.”
Fishing is a huge part of the culture in Sitka, Hitchcock-Lopez says. “Small Alaskan towns are defined by commercial fishing. … [Alaska is] the only place with a constitutional mandate to protect fisheries, and a good history of management of wild stocks.”
Corporate fishing, which involves trawling, is the minority in Alaska. Hitchcock-Lopez says that the majority of the fishingng industry are individuals who own their owwn boats. The typical crew for a salmon boat is two to three people. Growing up, Hitchcock-Lopez fished with his stepfather, Greg Jones, and his little sister, Sylvia.
Lopez first came to New Mexico to interview for United World College in Las Vegas, though he eventually ended up going to the campus in Wales. After UWC, Hitchcock-Lopez returned to New Mexico to attend St. John’s College.
You can’t get much farther away from an Alaskan fishing town than an enclave of bookish intellectuals nestled up in the mountains of a Southwest desert Disneyland. “I feel like I’m a bit between two worlds — commercial fishing and St. John’s is a bit of a stretch,” Hitchcock-Lopez says. “Generally, there’s not a lot of time for reading the classics [on the boat], but I sometimes bore my stepfather to tears talking about whatever abstract thing.”
At St. John’s, HitchcockLopez started selling small amounts of fish to his professors and some fellow students, who were getting wild-caught salmon direct from the producer.
Most responsible fish eaters are aware of the difference between farmed and wildcaught salmon. Farmed salmon is generally cheaper and of poorer quality, and many consider it borderline dangerous to both consumers and the environment because of all the antibiotics and contaminants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), carcinogenic chemicals that accumulate in higher levels in farmed fish.
“I have tried high-quality farmed fish to see if I could tell a difference,” Lopez says, “and I have been able to tell immediately. Usually it smells bad; that’s the first giveaway.” As any fishmonger will tell you, fish is not supposed to smell, well, fishy. “It really doesn’t have the defined meaty cell structure that I like from salmon,” adds Hitchcock-Lopez. “[Wild salmon] is like eating a steak of fish, a defined grain in the meat. [Farmed salmon] tends to kind of mush apart when you eat it.”
Hitchcock-Lopez is not necessarily against some farmed fish in principle, though he believes salmon is a poor choice and that a fish like tilapia fares better in farms. “I don’t necessarily see why that can’t be done in a responsible manner,” he says. “I wouldn’t necessarily write all fish farming off.”
Hitchcock-Lopez and his family company, which they call Seashaken, generally focus on two species of salmon: silver salmon and the prized king salmon. They start fishing for king salmon the first of July. King salmon, which are rarer, oilier and more expensive, are highly regulated, and the fishing window is sometimes as short as five or six days. After that,, theyy transition to fish- ing for silver salmon (sometimes called coho salmon) until September.
There are no space-age magic tricks to deepsea fishing. According to Hitchcock-Lopez, a lot of fishing is just looking for fish out on the open ocean, with fishing boats returning to places that tend to be fruitful. He adds that every fisherman has a handful of secret spots, although there are places managed by the state where they can’t fish at all.
“We usually go until we fill the boat with fish, or we run out of food, or we get really sick of each other,” laughs Hitchcock-Lopez. “The longest continuous trip I spent on the water was 28 days. Two weeks is sort of a typical trip.”
People will frequently make snarky statements about eating fish in the desert, as if, in this day and age, fish brought inland is less fresh than fish you get in a coastal city. This is simply not true. Most commercially available fish is sold frozen (far preferable to buying fresh-never-frozen fish that’s sat out on a dock for four days getting progressively less fresh), and the freezer technology available in the age of iPhones ensures that the fish you get here is just as fresh as the fish you get in Seattle, although possibly a touch more expensive, since you’re paying for overnight shipping.
On the Sea Miner, all the fish are cleaned on the boat, saltwater is run through the circulatory system to remove the blood, and the fish are flash frozen in the boat’s blast freezer within 45 minutes of being caught. When they get back to shore, Hitchcock-Lopez and company take their fish to a small, locally owned company to fillet and package his salmon for shipping.
At that point, Hitchcock-Lopez annd his family differ from many of thheir cohorts. There are two main ffish buyers in Sitka: North Pacific Seafoods and a local fishermen’s co-op. But Seashaken is trying a different model, with a more direct link to the buyer. Within the next month or so, Seashaken salmon will be sold locally through Beneficial Farms.
Community supported agriculture groups, for the uninitiated, are systems where interested consumers can pay into the co-op at the beginning of the year to support participating local farmers, and then pick up produce boxes every week of whatever’s growing. Seashaken’s fish would be an optional add-on, with different species of fish.
“I really enjoy working with those people,” Hitchcock-Lopez says. “[With CSAs], a lot of the people you’re talking to are the people you should be talking to. They want to hear the message about really good farms.”
Or, in this case, fishermen.