The Process
What makes our fish the best?
We sell salmon in two ways: Fresh Iced (never frozen, expedited to your door) and Fresh Frozen (frozen within 48 hours of being caught and still freshly delicious). Available as whole fish or individual fillets in varying sizes and quantities.
At sea.
Our salmon are hook-and-line caught, in person, each fish pulled into the boat one at a time. This method of fishing, known as trolling, allows extra time to clean and care for each fish as it comes aboard, and that makes all the difference. Our halibut and black cod are caught by long-line, another form of hook and line fishing.
With the addition of our Taku gillnet salmon, we now also offer gillnet-caught wild salmon, still picked one by one by hand. To learn more about the different ways our fish are caught, check out this out.
The catch.
Once the fish is hooked during trolling, it is pulled to the back of the boat by hand. A long gaff is used to stun the fish (necessary so the salmon won't thrash around on deck and get bruised). Then the gaff is used as a hook to swing it aboard. The gills are cut out immediately, a small pipette is inserted at the base of the neck into an artery, and a small amount of sea water is injected into the blood system. While the heart reflex pumps the water through the system, the blood is forced out and replaced with clean sea water. This "pressure bleeding" is critical in ensuring the best product possible. It is very important not to apply too much water pressure or it will bruise the flesh, but too little will not push the blood out of the system, and if it is done too long after being caught, it won't work at all. Our long-line fish is also bled immediately after catching. Check out the difference in this picture.
The offload.
Our fishermen tie their boat directly to the dock at the Yakobi Fisheries plant. Using a crane, a large bucket called a trayco is lowered into the fish hold; the section of the boat below deck where the fish are put on ice after being caught and cleaned. The fishermen (or the deckhand) load the fish one by one into the trayco. Once it’s brought back up, the fish are unloaded onto the sorting table to be sorted by size and species. From here, they get temporarily re-iced, or brought right to the processing room to be filleted, bagged, and frozen.
On shore.
When it reaches shore, we unload the fish from the boats in order to start the processing. If we are shipping it fresh, it is rinsed, checked for perfection, and put into a box with insulated liners and frozen gel packs to be expressed ship straight to you. For the fresh frozen product, we begin hand-filleting and portioning immediately. The portioned fish is vacuum sealed and flash frozen and reaches a core temperature of -40* within hours of being cut. The fish maintains its fresh quality because it is taken care of and frozen so quickly.
In the air.
We FedEx overnight or ship on Alaska Airlines Air Cargo. For Fresh, it is typically 2-3 days from the time the fish is caught to the time it is delivered to you. These fish are packaged cold, so the product temperature stays perfectly chilled. Our delicious Fresh Frozen product doesn't need to be quite so expedited, and is packaged so it stays below freezing on route to you and yours. To find out if you live near an Alaska Airlines Air Cargo depot, click here.