By Juan Montoya
I visited Petersburg, Alaska a few years ago during the salmon run in July.
Petersburg is a town on Mitkof Island in southeast Alaska, one of a chain of islands running along British Columbia in Canada. You can't drive there, and the only way to reach it is by plane (Air Alaska) or by ferry along the Inside Passage of the maritime highway that docks at Bellingham, Wash.
Petersburg was founded by Norwegian fishermen and is home to some 2,500 permanent residents. The place is astoundingly beautiful on a clear day and is surrounded by the Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest national forest that covers most of Southeast Alaska
Although the salmon were impressive – thousands of them thronging in small creeks toward the place of their birth – what caught my eye were the halibut that were unloaded by fishing boats for processing in the canneries in Petersburg.
Interestingly, many of the people who work on the fish processing season are from along the Mexican Pacific coast, such as the workers pictured above.Used as I was, to catch flounder in the surf off Boca Chica Beach and South Padre Island, I was blown away by the size of their Alaskan cousins.
Imagine a flounder on steroids. These fish live in deep cold water and fishermen must get a permit to harvest them. Halibut is a flatfish, genus Hippoglossus, from the family of the right-eye flounders.
That's about where the resemblance ends. These are huge fish.
The record for halibut was apparently broken off the waters of Norway in July 2013 by a 515-pound 8.6 foot fish. In July 2014 76-year-old Jack McGuire caught a 482-pound Pacific halibut in Glacier Bay, Alaska.
Halibut fish usually live on the ocean floor at depths between 160 to 6,560 feet but occasionally come closer to the surface. There are several guides in Petersburg who take visitors to fish for them and judging by the fish being packed for shipping in ice to be sent on planes, fishing is good.
One of the men above was telling me that when they first started going to work in the canneries there, the owners of the companies would have the workers throw out the fish head in the garbage.
Workers rescued them and started making halibut ceviche, which (I tasted it) is delicious. It is also quite expensive. Well, once the cannery people found out the value of the fish heads they were throwing, they started gleaning the heads of their meat and they stopped throwing them away.
These fish are so large that the men at the cannery had to use a forklift to pack them in ice containers. I never got a chance to go out and fish for halibut, although I did catch salmon which are plentiful and hungry as they make their way up the creeks. But you've got to watch for the bears who line the creek sides and snag the salmon. When we went to one, bear paw prints were visible all along the banks, so you know they're there.
When I told myu fishing buddies in Texas about the flounder's cousin, they were skeptical that such huge fish lived in the cold water until I showed them the pictures. Like me, they were blown away at their size.
I haven't had ti time or money to return there, but it's one of the things on my bucket list. Would you believe that there is a Mexican restaurant in Petersburg?
When I told myu fishing buddies in Texas about the flounder's cousin, they were skeptical that such huge fish lived in the cold water until I showed them the pictures. Like me, they were blown away at their size.
I haven't had ti time or money to return there, but it's one of the things on my bucket list. Would you believe that there is a Mexican restaurant in Petersburg?
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