Tuesday -- Alaska Letters

So I had a rather rough night sleep.  The constant generator noise from the processing plant across the street is mildly irritating, and any gap in the curtains means that the (day) light or car headlights can get in and terrifyingly fly across your room.  The sun isn’t setting until almost 11:30, and it comes up around 8.  I kept waking up, and I’m pretty sure there was loud music playing somewhere below me, but I don’t know, and Marcus said he didn’t hear anything.  But he’s kind of a bad witness to these things.

I got up and showered and typed up Monday’s adventure, and got done right at ten, when Marcus, Tim and I had agreed we would all congregate.  Marcus and I share a wall, so it was easy to find him, but Tim is on fish time so he arrives whenever he arrives.  We went to Amelia’s and Marcus and I arrived first, waited for Tim, he said he was coming, and now he’s bringing Tony Donovo from Caitlin Ann.  And we waited for Tim and Tony, and he said he was coming, and now Scott from the Nordic Fury was gonna come too.

Eventually Marcus and I ordered and that’s when Tim showed up.  Tony had already come to Amelia’s for breakfast a few hours before, but he ordered a burger anyway.  Scott from Nordic Fury was nice, and we all sat and talked (and by that I mean, periodically they stopped using so much jargon and I got a word in).  Mostly I watched CNN and ate my non-breakfast-carne-asada, which was delicious.  Then I considered napping with my eyes open, because breakfast went on for an hour and a half.  Bearing in mind that Marcus and I had already waited 20 minutes.  About noon we finally got out of there.

Then Marcus and I went out to see Roy with Delta Western, but he wasn’t there, so we drove along the length of the spit at the mouth of Dutch Harbor, and looked at a lot of piles of nets and other crap that’s piling up all over the island.  There were some boats tied up, including the Alaska Ocean which is where the guy with no fingers was going, and that’s a big ass boat.

When we got back from checking out the spit, Roy still wasn’t back, so we went into town (ish) and went to Harris Electric and talked to some people about some very exciting device that Jose desperately wants, and which we have ordered for him, and will have installed without telling him, and then have Brandon on the Westward One (who is also getting one) call Jose to brag, and apparently this will be very funny because Jose might have a heart attack because he wants this thing really bad.  They said what it is, and I think it has to do with imaging the fish going into the net, or possibly updating the phone system on the boat, I’m not sure.

After that, we got went back out to the Delta Western people, and Roy still wasn’t there, but we arranged to have dinner with him tomorrow.  Instead we stood around and talked to Maria the office manager for a really long time.  She’s in the process of moving full time to Anchorage, and she is some kind of an insomniac because she gets up at 3 am to get ready for work which starts at 8 and is only a 10 minute walk from her house.  Which I just think is crazy.  She says she does all her chores in the morning so her house is clean when she gets home and she can rest.  Maria’s a compulsive cross-stitcher (she’s on rotation off of knitting and crocheting right now).

We also stopped at Mac Enterprises, which is basically a guy called Jimmer and his wife in a single-wide with a lot of envelopes.  They were very nice, and they gave me a tee-shirt, and he gave me his card, and I kicked myself because I didn’t have mine in my pocket, they were in my room.  So now I have to drive back tomorrow by myself (which shouldn’t be too hard because there’s really like two roads) and give him my card.  If they still have cupcakes, I’ll take one, but I was sweet-thinged out from my coffee at the coffee stand after breakfast.

Then Marcus decided it was time for me to check out the plant, which meant that we spent some time on the Pacific Prince instead.  Vito Vanoni III (coolest name ever) was very nice, his family is from Northgate, and he says that when he’s back in Washington for Thanksgiving, we should go to dinner.  He’s very nice, and he gave me a tour of the boat, and it’s smaller than Chelsea K, but much bigger than the Caitlin Ann.  It was pretty nice, and Vito was pretty cool.  So we should probably go to dinner with his family, and I don’t know, talk about fishing or something.  I’m sure dad will be able to come up with something.

Finally we started the tour.  I’ll give this in as good of detail as possible, because I didn’t take pictures, because every time we left a work station, we had to dip our hands in cleaner so my hands were constantly wet, and pretty much everywhere tiny pieces of fish we flinging through the air.

So it starts with a pump that uses vacuum and reverse pressure to suck the fish out of the boat and up a giant outdoor silo.  At the top, they dump out into a dewater-er, and guys stand there and pick out the fish that aren’t Pollock or the obvious ones that are broken or cut in half or something horrible.  Those get sorted to different bins, and get reused later in other places.  It all gets weighed, and based on how much Pollock (and from the total pounds on the boat, reverse calculate how much other stuff as well) was fished and then the “fish ticket” gets sent to us in Seattle.  So that’s where my money comes from.

From the dewater and sorting, the fish get sent to some chilly holding tanks for a while, and when the plant is ready to process that 20-ton fish bucket, it gets pumped into the size sorter.  The size sorter is a clever set of rolling cylinders that get wider toward the end, so the little fish fall through the slots sooner than the big fish, and they basically are grouped as small medium and large.  Medium and large go to their respective fileting machines, where people are lined up to help make sure the fish settle in the right direction to get gutted, have the backbone and head removed, and then the skin peeled off.  They pull out broken ones that have gotten through to this point.

The small fish get sent right to the surimi section.  They also get gutted, debackboned, beheaded and skinned, but they get ground up really finely into fish bits.  The fish bits get washed, and turned into cold fish stew, then dewatered, and dewatered, and dewatered (and ground up some more) until they are a really fine paste.  Then there’s a whole system of grinders and a screw that presses even more water out of the fish, until it’s literally just the protein.

At this point, the protein will be basically destroyed if it’s frozen as is, because it’s too delicate without any other support, and defrosting it would turn it to useless mush.  So they add some sugar and preservatives as a cushion for the protein fibers.  This gets mixed together in a giant Cuisinart and put into 10 pound bags.  Marcus grabbed a little, and I tasted it, and it’s completely neutral.  Slightly sweet, and gummy kind of like dough, but it’s just sort of neutral.

What’s cool about this whole system – side note – is that Marcus planned and designed this whole plant.  When I tell you about the five other things being created here, it’s incredible that all the frozen things end up in the same freezers, and everything is organized into a maze that puts you right back out at the beginning again.  It’s truly incredible.  This is also a story of how you can use every single freaking part of the animal.  And you thought we didn’t make anything in America anymore. Pshaw!

So the surimi gets made into things like fake crab (who knew).  It gets mixed with about 15 to 20% actual crab, and then gets rolled super thin and dyed and rolled up (because crabs grow rings like a tree) and sold as krab meat.  Also, there’s just a ton of Japanese foods that are made with Pollock and surimi, and I guess there is such a thing as fish sausages, and I’ve probably eaten something from Westward Seafoods at some point in my sushi dabbling.  So how about that.

Meanwhile – elsewhere in the plant – the filets get cleaned and neatened to be frozen, the roe gets made into the stuff in miso soup and the sprinkles on some sushi.  The roe is better in the mating season in A season because obviously there are more females carrying around eggs when they get caught.  They pull out the whole, basically the ovaries, and I guess in Japan they take the whole ovary, cure it in salt and spices, and smear it on crackers.  Which is like Pollock caviar or something.  Very salty apparently.

Everything that isn’t Pollock goes to the other part of the plant, and they take these massive Halibut and cut off the cheeks and filet and skin and behead and freeze them too.  They are massive fish steaks.  Marcus said you could sew yourself a windbreaker out of the skin of a Halibut.  He also said you can tell when there’s Halibut in the plant because it smells kind of sweet, which is does, but in a gross cat food kind of way.

We have one boat that delivers Bairdi crab, and they have a whole place to cut off the legs and this weird machine that spins and you use to shave off the tough crab gills (didn’t know crabs had gills, but how else would they breathe?), and it’s the technique for making baseball bats.  The boil the crab right away, and then they acclimatize it to colder and colder water before freezing it.

Everything ends up at these giant freezers that are negative 20 Celsius.  My nose hairs froze and I got a drippy nose when we came out again.  It was so cold in there it was snowing lightly.

The last thing we do, with all the broken fish and fish bones and junk and bits, it send it to the fishmeal section.  That’s just a series of mechanized conveyer belts and hoppers and cookers and dewaterers and steamers, so there are very few people, but it’s very hot in there.  Basically we make a fish stew, separate bits from oils and waters, bits become really dry and make fish meal (they sell the fish ear bones to an artist who makes earrings), and the soup becomes fish oil or fish liquid that I forget what the liquid does after that.  The fish oil is most interesting because it fuels one of our diesel generators.  We’re practically a self-sustained operation.

There are a ton of generators, and a lot more native Alaskans in the plant, and a TON of Japanese.  Westward Seafoods was originally Japanese owned, until some laws got enacted, and we couldn’t have such a big foreign power eating up our commerce, so they gave most of it to Greg and Marcus.

After that we went to Dutch Harbor Fast Food (which was not fast at all), and had some dinner.  I had a very interesting conversation with Marcus, and I find him to be a very interesting guy.  He’s got some Matt in him, which is weird, but cool.  He sweats on contact like Matt does.  Hot room?  Sweaty face.

We did more driving around, and we went up Bunker Hill, and dear God it was so beautiful.  The skies parted, so all my pictures are sunny, and you can see the rays of sunshine.  It’s like where the dinosaurs used to roam.  It’s incredible.  I got pictures throughout the day of the Russian Orthodox church, and so many hillsides, and some flowers, and a bald eagle.  I didn’t get a picture, but I am in love with the little ground squirrels.  Coming back from Bunker Hill (which really does require pictures, to follow), we saw one that was a big fat one, and Marcus said the quote of the day “I got my nuts, nom nom.”  It was so funny, and he’s got this walrus mustache and he built a multi-million dollar seafood processing plant, and it just cracked me up.  It’s so incongruous.

We stopped at Alaska Ship for snacks, and now I’m chowing through Starburst.  I don’t know what things to buy for everyone, there are really cute moose shaped salad tongs that I want.  I am thinking about getting some sweatpants that say Dutch Harbor on them.  I don’t know.  I might get a classic Alaska Grown shirt for Aspen.  I haven’t seen any wolf stuff, only eagles and whales.

I’m super tired now, and all I did was sit here and type this.  It’s so overwhelming how much stuff I have seen and done today.  Somewhere in the melee I stopped in at Tim’s office, I met some other office people, Elizabeth needed my timesheet I forgot from Friday, and probably something else happened that I can’t remember where it fits chronologically.

But, I realized that I can see Russia from my hotel room, so everything is ok there.  J