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Published: August 13th 2012
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Our campground is full of fishermen. I believe there are around 200 parking spaces here and it is packed with tents, RV's and boats. The silver salmon is supposed to be coming in now. Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day here - sunny and in the 60's. Jim and I took a walk along the bike path that goes along the bottom of the mountain in the attached picture. It has a waterfall flowing down the side. This is the view from our RV park. The mountain looks like chenille. Our RV park has small cabins around the perimeter. As we were leaving, we saw four guys out front of their cabin canning salmon. They are from Minnesota. Two of the guys have been coming here since 1999. This is the first year for the other two. They fly into Anchorage and rent a car to come to Valdez to fish for a week. After they have canned their salmon, they box it up and send it home. They had 8 oz cans and a sealer and a pressure cooker. Hopefully you can see these in the attached pictures. You can see their fiinished cans on the table. They said the
cans cost $70.00 for 44. They can the salmon with canning salt and lemon juice. In some cans they add Heinz 57 and garlic. In others they add ketchup. They said the ones with the ketchup are very good added with mayonaise and used as a spread for crackers. They were very nice and gave me one of these. I am anxious to try this when I get home. After they can the salmon, they put it in a pressure cooker for 90 minutes. They said they used 24 pink salmon for 48 cans. They had already canned 56 cans. Yesterday they had a Silver Salmon Fishing Derby for women here. I talked to a lady who works at the park and she said that she went and 35 ladies went on her boat but only 5 caught fish. There were 705 women signed up and only 328 had fish weighed. The winner caught a silver weighing 15.22 lbs. I believe that she won $1,000 in prize money and $1,000 worth of gift certificates. Our guys have been fishing too this week. Larry and Carroll went out fishing on a charter boat and caught 4 halibut and 2 rock fish.
I believed these were a total of around 40 lbs. Michael, Barbara and Carroll's son, came down from Fairbanks. He and the guys caught 42 pink salmon. Michael brought down his smoker and vacuum sealer. Michael made up his special brine recipe for the salmon. The salmon need to be in the brine for at least 8 hrs. Then he smokes the salmon for 4 hrs using wood chips. In the attached picture you can see Michael using the vacuum sealer with the smoker in the background. Carroll is cutting up the salmon. They are freezing the salmon to take home. Larry and Carroll went fishing again tonight (they wait until the tide comes in as that is when the fish come in). I believe we are leaving Valdez Tuesday.
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