Mysteries of the sea (cucumber)
A little-known Southeast Alaska treasure
Erik Satie described the sea cucumber, or
holothurian, in his 1913 score for "Dried-out embryos," ostensibly to
help the pianist play more convincingly:
The Holothurian crawls
across boulders and rocky
surfaces.
This sea-animal purrs like a
cat; also, it produces
disgusting silky threads.
Light appears to have an
incommodating effect on it.
Even more inconvenient than light, for sea
cucumbers, are Southeast Alaska divers, who at this time of year harvest
thousands of cucumbers from their benthic homes, mostly near Ketchikan.
Just one species is harvested: Parastichopus
californicus, a warty, sometimes spotted, reddish, forearm-long fellow with meaty
muscles that run down the length of its five-way radially symmetric body. The
skins are boiled and salted until black and shriveled; the meat is frozen in
chicken-breast-like packets.
Asian buyers ordered extra this year to
prepare for the Olympics, according to one diver.
At an estimated $3.8 million a year, the
value of last year's cucumber harvest was one-fifth of 1 percent of the $1.7
billion total for all
"The ocean floor swarms with vast herds
of holothurians," says a University of California Museum of Paleontology
Web page on the tube-shaped bags of water.
"One way to think of a holothurian,"
it says, "is as a sea urchin that is lying on its side, stretched out, and
missing much of its skeleton!"
"People just don't even know these
critters exist," said
Known unknowns
For instance, nobody knows how long sea
cucumbers live, how to age them or when they reproduce.
This sort of information would help out sea
cucumber harvest managers, said Pritchett, who spends his summers counting sea
cucumbers, sea urchins and geoducks. For instance, one could estimate how long
it takes depleted populations to grow back.
State biologists' management strategy boils
down to this: Count the sea cucumbers in an area; allow divers to harvest a
certain proportion; and be conservative about it, given the dearth of
knowledge.
The law says you have to survey each area
before allowing harvest, and the department doesn't have the resources to
survey each fishery each year. So biologists rotate the roughly 20 fishing
grounds. Each is surveyed every three years, and only opened if enough are
found.
In some areas cucumbers live like urbanites,
"elbow to elbow," Pritchett said. In other, more rural parts, he'll
see one or two every square meter.
A sharp reduction in the number of sea
cucumbers in certain areas this year was not definitively explained by
researchers.
But Pritchett said he suspects sea otters are
partly to blame for the sudden disappearances of once-bountiful geoducks, sea
urchins and sea cucumbers in a few places. The sight of a raft of 100-plus sea
otters elicits no magical-moment-in-Alaska coo from him.
"I get a sinking feeling when I see
that," he said. "You can get down on the bottom, and it looks like it
was carpet-bombed where they dug the bottom out."
Letting it all hang out
We return to Satie's text. It's unclear
whether scientists have substantiated the purring. But the "disgusting
silky threads" are an oft-used, multipurpose sea cucumber strategy, well
known to those who have disturbed the sea cucumber or poked it with a sea star.
In an annual fall cleaning, the sea cucumber
expels its own guts. Its ridding itself of parasites after spending all summer
vacuuming up whatever's in the mud, including nasty little worms that would
feed on the cucumber from the inside. The guts grow back in two to four weeks.
Contents of the guts vary.
"Sometimes it's gonads," or other
miscellaneous viscera, said Kristin Cieciel, who studies jellyfish for the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in
The sea cucumber also may self-eviscerate, as
scientists say, to reduce its metabolic costs in hard times, such as when the
temperature or salinity changes.
Under attack, a sea cucumber will
self-eviscerate, in an attempt to distract a predator into eating the guts
while it makes a speedy sea-cucumber getaway.
Speedy is relative. A sea cucumber gyrates
its tubular torso, thrusting itself into the water column. Cieciel tagged her
subjects (a challenge, because when you punch a hole in a sea cucumber it
leaks, and that likely affects its motion - the tags are similar to those that
attach price tags to clothing) and followed them on their day. A few traveled
up to 25 meters in a day.
"We had some cheetahs," she said.
The dangers of cuke-picking
Though the prey is slow, sea-cucumber divers
have to work fast.
"Once you go into water, you work like a
dog. A mad dog," said diver Janusz Kunat of Gustavus. "You swing, and
one eye is looking left while the other eye is picking cucumbers,
nonstop."
Sea cucumber diving is still managed in the
old derby style, as halibut once was. During the season, when an area opens, a
diver has seven hours on Monday and four hours on Tuesday to collect his daily
bag limit of 2,000 pounds.
One sea cucumber weighs a half-pound or less.
Thus a day's work might be 4,000 cucumbers, piled up in the boat. And a diver
isn't down that whole time, but spends about an hour at 50 feet, then must
decompress.
Kunat has dived since the 1990s. He has been
out in hurricane-force winds; when he was sick but fortified on NyQuil
("People do this all the time"); and sometimes, as neither he nor
anyone else recommends, alone. Injuries are common, according to Kunat. Last
year a Southeast diver died.
"Don't write about this like it's a
super sport," he said. "It's a really stupid fishery. A lot of divers
dive alone. You anchor the boat, and go down, and go up, and hope the boat's
still there."
Last year Fish and Game counted 179
sea-cucumber divers, well below the authorized maximum of 389 in this
limited-entry fishery and the all-time high of 424 divers in 1995, which was a
year following high prices.
Kunat said the dive fishery is difficult and
uneconomical, given current fuel prices.
"When we die, it's going to be the end
of the fishery ... You'd have to be crazy to do this anyway."
By September, hosing off recreational or fishing boats could be subject to EPA regulation and permitting
By Laine Welch
July 14, 2008
Monday
Fishermen are seeing red flags as Congress retools the rules
that will govern the U.S. Coast Guard through 2012.
The USCG Act that was passed by the U.S. House (HR 2830) contains business busters for fishing operations, mostly in the form of new licensing, inspection and reporting requirements for even the smallest boats. The bill now passes to the U.S. Senate.
"It would require survival craft on any commercial fishing vessel, even seine skiffs. That doesn't' make sense," said Mark Vinsel, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, representing 37 fishing groups.
"We've got fishing vessels registered in Alaska as small as 7 feet, and more than 2,000 that are 20 feet or under," Vinsel said. "The breadth of the different fisheries in Alaska does not necessarily match the Coast Guard's idea of what they are trying to regulate, and the safety they are trying to ensure for fishermen."
The U.S. Fishing Industry Safety
Advisory Committee recommends that the USCG assess "risk
by fishery", instead of using a blanket approach. The committee
is chaired by Jerry Dzugan, director of the Alaska Marine Safety
Education Association in Sitka.
Boats got class
Also included in the USCG Act "classification" for fishing boats.
"That's something usually applied to cargo ships and tankers and cruise ships, not fishing boats," said UFA president Joe Childers. "That's a process that very few in the fishing industry have heard of."
Classed means a vessel has been examined by, for example, the American Shipping Society, Childers explained.
"They look at its structural integrity, its ability to maintain power, propulsion systems, dewatering devices, navigation equipment, the deck machinery, basically, everything on the vessel," he said.
Initially the classification requirements will hit boats 50' or greater. Smaller vessels are exempted until 2018. At that time, all vessels that are 25 years or older would also require classification.
"Were this to go into effect, I believe you'd find a lot of boats fishing today in Alaska and elsewhere would be obsolete," Childers said.
The USCG estimates 80,000 commercial
fishing boats are operating in the U.S.
Hose this
By September, any water running off the decks will be considered "incidental discharge" - if the Clean Boating Act (S. 2766) gets the nod from Congress.
"Hosing off your recreational or fishing boat would be subject to EPA regulation and permitting. We don't think this makes sense," said Senator Lisa Murkowski, adding it also applies to bilge water, cooling water and ballast discharges.
All recreational boaters are lined up to get a pass on the EPA permits, but not America's small fishing boats. Murkowski is taking heat from the huge sport boat lobby for holding up the bill last week.
"We've got some 9,700 vessels in the Alaska fleet, predominately small boats with an average length of 36 feet. I think it is absolutely appropriate that if we exclude recreational vessels, as I believe that we should, that it is reasonable to also provide for permit relief for the smaller commercial vessels," she said in a phone interview.
Murkowski objected last week to a request from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to pass by unanimous consent an exemption for all recreational boaters from the EPA permit, and tried unsuccessfully to expand the same break to commercial fishing boats.
"The inequity of a small 36 foot seiner possibly being subject to these regulations and then you look at the 414 foot yacht that (MicroSoft co-founder) Paul Allen owns under the Nelson Boxer bill, that vessel would be wholly exempt, whereas our little seiner would be subject to regulation and permitting and potential fines and sanctions - it simply doesn't make any sense," Sen. Murkowski fumed.
U.S. fishing boats 125 feet or less would be exempt from the new regulations under Murkowski's proposal. But so far, Senator Boxer has refused to budge.
"As a matter of fact, 13 million boaters are going to wake up very unhappy in the morning if Sen. Murkowski objects to this bill," Boxer said in a press release, calling it a "delicate compromise."
The Marine Exchange of Alaska
calls it "a nightmare for anyone who operates a watercraft,
from a 950 foot container ship to a 14 foot outboard." A
federal court has ruled the EPA must finalize the permitting
process by Sept. 30.
Offshore Fish Flash!
A proposed rule was quietly published last week in the Federal Register that opens the door for offshore fish farms in U.S. waters. By going through the rule making process, the Bush administration can sidestep Congressional debate and approval. The deep sea farms will make use of existing oil and gas platforms from three to 200 miles off the nation's coasts.
A comprehensive energy bill
passed by Congress in 2005 gives the Minerals Management Service
the authority to regulate alternate projects, such as fish farms,
on offshore platforms, said SeaFood Business. The Minerals Management
Service will accept public comment on the proposed rule for 60
days and hopes to finalize the new rule by the end of the year.
Daily News Staff Writer
Commercial harvest divers landed an estimated 90,000 pounds of geoduck clams during fishery openings this week in the Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island area.
That's probably close to a new record for a single week's catch, according to Bo Meredith, assistant area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Commercial Fisheries Division office in Ketchikan.
The catch, which occurred Wednesday and Thursday, brings the total harvest for the 2007-08 season that began Oct. 4 up to about 487,000 pounds.
That leaves about 83,000 pounds available to harvest from the season's overall guideline harvest level of 570,200 pounds.
"It's winding down real fast,"Meredith said.
And it's gone fairly well so far, said Phil Doherty, executive director for the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association that represents commercial harvest divers.
Low levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning have meant that at least a few of the 14 geoduck fishing areas in the region have been approved for harvesting each fishing week so far.
"We've had an area pass (PSP testing) every week, and we've had multiple areas pass every week,"Meredith said.
Under the current management strategy, geoduck fishing areas are opened for harvest only after passing PSP testing so the clams can be sold on the more lucrative "live"market than as processed clams.
"That's the ultimate goal, to get the product out live,"Doherty said.
Unfortunately, fishermen don't appear to be earning as much for the clams as in recent seasons.
"The price is probably lower this year than what we've seen in some past years,"Doherty said, noting that this season's prices have been in the range of $3 to $3.50 per pound.
Prices at this point in the 2006-07 season were in the mid-$4 per pound range.
Geoduck clams average about 2 pounds apiece in weight, but they can weigh up to 10 pounds.
The big market for Alaska's geoduck clams is China, although some go to other Asian countries and to Asian populations along the West Coast of the United States and Canada.
The live market is sensitive to supply. Alaska's competitors include British Columbia, Washington state and Mexico.
"It's real easy to flood (the market),"Meredith said. "It depends heavily on what Washington and B.C. are doing at the same time."
Doherty noted that Mexico has been harvesting "quite a bit"this year.
But high PSP levels in Washington state fisheries have resulted in lower volumes of geoducks harvested from there recently, a factor that appears to have helped bump Alaska prices up, said Meredith.
"I think there's not as many geoducks being put on the market,"Meredith said. "That really helps them (local geoduck divers) out."
The overall quota for this season's fishery is about 100,000 pounds lower than the previous season. However, it's about 190,000 pounds more than during the 2005-06 season - the last time this particular "rotation"of specific fishing areas saw harvesting.
Meredith and Doherty credit the boost to an effort by SARDFA and Fish and Game to identify and survey new geoduck clam beds in the region.
Using SARDFA funds and grant money from the Alaska Legislature, SARDFA divers have undertaken reconnaissance efforts in various areas to map the location of new geoduck beds, and the presence of additional geoduck beds near existing fishing areas.
The location data is given to Fish and Game, which surveys the areas and determines whether they can be opened to fishing.
The reconnaissance /survey effort earlier this year paid big dividends.
Two new areas - Tlevak Strait and the Maurelle Islands off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island - were opened this year with guideline harvest levels of 21,700 pounds and 51,600 pound, respectively.
The quota for a previously used harvest area near Ketchikan -the Vegas and Hotspur islands - was increased from 23,000 pounds in 2005 to 134,000 pounds this season through the reconnaissance/survey effort.
"It's working out good,"Meredith said.
Participation by harvest divers has remained steady throughout the season, ranging between 42 and 47 divers most weeks so far, according to Fish and Game data. The exception was Nov. 15, when only 20 divers participated.
There are a total of 112 limited entry permits for the geoduck fishery.
E.C. Phillips & Son, NorQuest Seafoods and the Craig-based Noyes Island Smokehouse have been buying geoduck clams this year. Some harvesters have been marketing their own clams also, according to SARDFA and Fish and Game.
After opening on Oct. 4, the geoduck fishery continued with one day a week openings (Thursdays) in the areas that passed PSP testing through Nov. 15.
The fishery was closed during the Thanksgiving week, then was reopened for a two-day opening on Nov. 28-29 in the areas that passed PSP testing.
Following this week's two-day opening, there are only three fishing areas off of the west coast of Prince of Wales (Maurelle islands, Steamboat Bay and Little Steamboat Bay) and a small number near Ketchikan that have quota remaining.
There's the possibility of a two-day opening next week (dependent upon PSP testing results) followed by a two-week closure for the Christmas holidays.
Any areas with remaining quota that fishermen have not been able to harvest because of PSP levels by the end of the season will open for harvest for the processed (non-live) market on May 7.
Many geoduck harvest divers also participate in the commercial fishery for sea cucumbers, which began Oct. 1 with openings on Mondays and Tuesdays of each week in specific fishing areas in Southeast Alaska.
The 2007-08 commercial sea cucumber season is just about over. As of this week, only one sea cucumber harvest area, southern Lynn Canal, has any quota remaining.By SCOTT BOWLEN
Daily News Staff Writer
Summer's over, but not commercial fishing.
Far from it.
Three dive harvest seasons start next week in Southeast Alaska, as does the commercial pot shrimp fishing season.
Opening at 8 a.m. Monday will be the pot shrimp fishery and the dive harvest fishery for sea cucumbers.
The dive harvest fishery for red sea urchins opens at 5 a.m. Monday. The dive harvest fishery for geoduck clams could open on Thursday, based on testing results.
Sea cucumbers
Despite the name, sea cucumbers look more like large slugs. But their lack of conventional beauty doesn't diminish the steady demand for dried "cukes" in Asian marketplaces.
Commercial harvest divers here in Southeast Alaska will have an overall guideline harvest level of about 1.38 million pounds available when the season starts Monday.
That's down from the 2006-07 GHL of about 1.59 million pounds, but still within the general range of sea cucumber GHLs during recent years.
"(It's a) little bit of a decrease from last year, but this particular rotation has always been the least amount, poundage wise," said Bo Meredith, assistant area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commercial Fisheries Division office in Ketchikan.
Sea cucumber fishing areas are on three-year rotations. After harvests occur in a fishing area during one season, the area is closed to fishing for the next two seasons to allow stocks to rebuild.
Four new harvest areas will open this season. Those areas — two in the East Behm Canal area, one at the Keku Islands, and one at East Baranof Island — have a combined GHL of about 175,000 pounds.
Sea cucumbers are found on the sea floor. Divers harvest the critters by picking them up and placing them in bags that are raised to the surface.
About 170 commercial harvest divers participated in the 2006-07 season, according to Meredith. The largest number of divers participating during any week's fishery that season was 152 divers.
No changes are planned for the open fishing periods this season. Areas will open by emergency order from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Mondays, and from 8 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, according to Fish and Game.
Areas are closed for the season as harvests reach or near the GHL set for the specific areas.
Individual divers can harvest up to 2,000 pounds of sea cucumbers per trip.
The trip harvest limits and two-day-per-week openings are management tools for slowing the pace of the fishery, according to Phil Doherty, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association.
"Even with that in mind, it's still a relatively quick fishery," Doherty said. "I would think most of the quota would be harvested in the first six to seven weeks of the fishery, then you'll have some of the more remote areas that will go a little bit longer."
Last season, harvest divers landed about 73 percent of the overall GHL during the first five weeks. Harvesting was all but complete by the third week of December.
The fishery closes by regulation on March 31
Geoduck clams
Like sea cucumbers, most of the geoduck clams harvested in Southeast Alaska are destined for Asian markets, where the large clams' siphons are prized in Chinese and Japanese cuisine.
Southeast Alaska commercial harvest divers can expect an overall guideline harvest level of at least 517,500 pounds of geoducks for the 2007-08 season, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
And, if two new harvest areas pass state water-quality testing, the overall quota could increase by 73,300 pounds to a total of 590,800 pounds.
While that's below the previous season's 681,900-pound GHL for southern Southeast Alaska (a small amount of geoducks are harvested in Sitka, too), it's substantially better than it would have been without an industry reconnaissance effort that helps the state survey new and existing geoduck beds.
"What (the Southeast Regional Dive Fisheries Association) does is hire some divers, and go to these areas and find beds of geoducks — concentrations of geoducks — and then we give that information to the fish and game department," said Doherty. "When (Fish and Game goes) out to do their yearly assessment ... they're not spending their time looking for the geoduck beds, they're on the geoduck beds, and then they can do the biomass assessment work."
The industry reconnaissance work has become more precise, according to Justin Breese, assistant area management biologist with Fish and Game's Commercial Fisheries Division office in Ketchikan.
"They've got it down more to a science now," Breese said. "They have better maps and better mapping software. They can put us right on the beds."
The effort paid off this year with a huge increase in quota for the Vegas and Hotspur Islands area near Duke Island. The GHL there will 134,400 pounds this season, up from 23,500 pounds during the 2005-06 season, which was the most recent season that the area was opened to harvest.
However, the Kaigani Strait area off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island is seeing a GHL drop to 35,000 pounds from the most recent level of 47,000, according to Breese.
The two new areas will be Tevlak Strait and the Maurelle Islands area off west POW, with GHLs of 21,700 pounds and 51,600 pounds, respectively.
"The two new areas on the west coast won't be opened up until the first part of December because we won't be done with our water quality testing before then," Doherty said.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation requires an extensive series of tests before it allows a new geoduck clam fishing area to open, according to Doherty.
"They choose 13 stations within an area, and we have to go out and test them 15 times over the course of the year," he said, noting that SARDFA pays for the testing. "There's a lot of money involved because it all has to be done by floatplane."
Another unique aspect of the geoduck clam fishery is that, during most of the season, individual fishing areas aren't opened until clam samples from that area test within the low ranges of paralytic shellfish poisoning that allow the clams to be shipped as the more lucrative "live" product.
Clam samples are harvested on Saturdays or Sundays and flown to the DEC lab in Anchorage, where they are tested for PSP.
If DEC certifies an area for live sales, the area will open for harvest on from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on that Wednesday or Thursday. During the first several weeks of the fishery, open fishing periods are one day a week.
The first possible fishing period in the southern Southeast Alaska area will be Thursday, depending on PSP testing, according to the department.
Between 60-65 harvest divers participate in a typical season, said Breese.
Sea Urchins
Lots of sea urchins have been available for commercial harvest in southern Southeast Alaska, but woeful economics driven by a glut of illegally harvested urchins from Russia have meant that few urchins are harvested here.
"The quota again this year is over 5 million pounds of red sea urchins," said SARDFA's Doherty. "Last year we harvested less than a million (pounds). Unless something turns around, and ... for the short term, I don't hear of anything turning around."
Sea urchins are harvested for their roe, which is extracted from the animals in a labor-intensive process, graded, and packed in trays for shipment. A frequent market is Japan, where the roe, called uni, is used in sushi.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to harvest urchins with good roe content, and Southeast Alaska's logistics can make it difficult to get the fresh product to market, according to Doherty.
But the main problem, he said, is an unregulated tide of Russian product.
"By all accounts it's turned into just an open fishery, not run by the Russian government, but run by Russian mobs," Doherty said. "They are just flooding the Japanese market with sea urchin roe. And it's put our sea urchin fishery almost out of business. Not quite, but it's certainly on life support."
It's also affected sea urchin harvests in British Columbia, Washington state and California, he said.
But Alaska still has the resource, he said, and one urchin processor has been operating in Ketchikan.
A total of 11 harvest divers have made deliveries of urchins during the 2006-07 season, according to Meredith of Fish and Game's Commercial Fisheries Division office in Ketchikan.
Out of those 11 divers, three or four have made deliveries consistently, according to Meredith.
As of Aug. 24, harvest divers had landed about 545,000 pounds of sea urchins in southern Southeast Alaska from a quota of nearly 5.6 million pounds.
The quota will reset at 5.59 million pounds in when the 2007-08 season begins at 5 a.m. Monday.
The open fishing periods are from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily., in specific fishing areas in southern Southeast Alaska.
pdated 07/10/07| Feasting on leftovers
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        San Diegan with deep fishing roots is using sea urchin remnants to create a new product for anglersBy Ed ZieralskiUNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER October 21, 2006
It's a Discovery Channel moment, to be sure, a scene out of a giant aquarium tank at SeaWorld. But instead, this was in ocean waters off San Diego, in a kelp bed, where sea urchins thrive in the wild and munch on kelp and other sea grasses.
Urchins are a main player at Rudie's processing plant off Morena Boulevard, where the locally caught, bottom-feeding echinoderms' internal roe, or uni, is sold to the top sushi restaurants in San Diego or shipped throughout the country. Uni is considered an aphrodisiac by some, and a delicacy. Gomes watched as the excess byproduct from sea urchins – the leftover uni – oozed and slid down tilted cleaning boards into garbage cans at the plant. “We were just throwing the goop out, and it was causing all sorts of problems, clogging drains, all that,” Gomes said. So being the entrepreneur that he is, Gomes wondered if the goop might make for good chum bait. He froze some and tried it, tying a can of it off on a buoy and drifting between it down in South Bay. “I waited for the proper moment to approach Dave about the whole Uni Goop deal,” Gomes said. “Dave was really busy and on the phone with an important client, and I asked him if it'd be all right if I used the excess uni for bait. He said, 'Go ahead, go ahead.' So I just started doing it.” When Gomes took the frozen uni chum out for some test fishing in south San Diego Bay and in the kelp, it worked like a magnet for fish. “It was phenomenal, like throwing popcorn in the park for pigeons,” Gomes said. “We caught everything, spotted bay bass, halibut. My record for one day on bonefish was 17. But I wasn't surprised. Ask any diver like Dave, and they'll tell you fish can't resist this stuff.” Said Rudie: “Fish just start swarming if you open an urchin underwater like that. It starts with calico bass, sheephead, señorita fish, then bait fish, and pretty soon you have a frenzy around you. You'll have five to six different species swimming around you, 100 or so calico bass within a 100-foot radius.”
 Advertisement
“It was all Tommy's idea,” said Rudie, who, as president, owns and runs Catalina Offshore Products, with his wife, Kathy, assisting him. Said Kathy Rudie: “This is all 100 percent natural products, no additives, no preservatives, not for human consumption.” The Rudies know something about entrepreneurial ingenuity. Dave Rudie started Catalina Offshore Products with nothing more than a boat, a pickup truck and some diving gear in 1984. He ran it out of his garage at first. Dave began by diving for sea urchins and seaweed. Back at the plant, they perfected a secret technique of processing uni, and over the years, it hasn't hurt that famous chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and national magazines like Vogue have raved about Catalina Offshore Products and its uni. All that and it's considered a sexy food. Today, Catalina Offshore Products is a $10 million a year business, a going concern with 62 employees. “That doesn't count what Uni Goop is bringing in,” Gomes joked. Gomes likes to say that after two years in the development stage, Uni Goop, which went on the market this past summer, is “flying down the runway, but hasn't taken off yet.” He has not really marketed the bait, other than to promote it on local Web sites such as sdfish.com. Only a handful of local bait and tackle shops were willing to take a chance on the Uni Goop. “Float tubers who fish the lagoons and back bay and kayakers have been using it,” Gomes said. Gomes has added a new product, Uni Butter, that will be scent bait in a tube. “The Uni Butter will be more user-friendly,” Gomes said. “Fishermen will be able to carry it in their pockets. It won't have to be refrigerated, and they'll be able to use it day after day.” Gomes is keeping his proud Portuguese family tradition alive by staying active and being a viable man in the fishing community. His father, David Gomes, at “80-something,” according to his son, still runs sport boats as a second captain. The Gomes family arrived here in 1910, and it is represented on the dramatic Tuna Memorial on Shelter Island. These days at Catalina Offshore Products, the garbage cans that fill with the uni leftovers aren't called garbage cans anymore. “Goop cans,” Gomes said. Gomes has taken one man's garbage and turned it into gold goop. For more information on buying fish wholesale at Catalina Offshore Products, Inc., call (619) 297-9797 or check www.catalinaop.com. For information on Uni Goop and Uni Butter, check unigoop.com. The bait is available at Dana Landing, Hook, Line & Sinker, Squidco and Sports Bait & Tackle. |
I am passing along 2 pieces of information, one a permit
for sale, the other is Mitch Cowan from
Hello,
I have a cucumber permit for
can help
spread the word and send any offers me way, my email is
liquidrop@hotmail.com and mailing
address is PO BOX 494, CLALLAM BAY, WA
98326, that would be greatly
appreciated.
Thank you.
Ken
Woodside