Dani, I should have pulled out the camera phone when the three of us were sitting in our raingear in a twenty foot center console. waiting-out the deluge that was falling on us in the Big Summer Island harbor-of-refuge!. ONE of us had an ear-to-ear grin nearly the entire time. Whoever said that youth is wasted on the young was mistaken. .Grandpa and I were kept busy stowing rods to prone on the deck, and discussing whether we could nudge the boat a little closer to the overhanging tree line on the hill by the old submerged crib landing when this was a summer commercial fishing colony site, to get some improved lightning strike protection!
Tom, one odd benefit of the Quagga sp. mussel invasion: the large four and five year-old chinook are leaner fish with improved edibility when compared to the Pacific salmon we used to catch in the 1970s. Fat content of alewife has fallen significantly, one issue in their population decline since they tap somatic energy content to produce gametes in early spring, prior spawning. Specific to body-burden contaminants content: Wisconsin toxicologists presented data from three sites in Lake Michigan two years ago at the Great Lakes Fishery Commission's Lake Michigan Committee, lake presentations sessions that documented the body-burden levels of PCB (which are fat and can be removed via skinning and removing the belly fat strip below the rib tips) has fallen significantly and sequentially from high levels in the late 1970s. Methyl-mercury is another issue, since it bioaccumulates in both fat and muscle tissue on a roughly equal basis in fish in the Great Lakes.. Per the Wisconsin data, methyl-mercury body burden content was equivalent for newly legal length lake trout (10 tp 18" fish) when compared to spawning age chinook. (3-5YO fish) . :Michigan crafts their fish consumption advisory to include dioxin-like PCB congeners as well, unlike Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana fish consumption guidance documents. Lake trout remain on the do not consume list...after fifty-plus years of Federal support, plantings, and protections targeted toward achieving a self-sustaining population.
I am not a big steelhead fan from an edibility perspective, but marinated in some dry white wine and Italian salad dressing for three hours and grilled they are quite good. As Carl mentioned, smoked over alder, apple, or cherry, salmon are excellent. Grilled with Cajun spice rub, they are good, too. Baked with Bernaise sauce, tarragon, and capers with cherry tomatoes, skinned fillets are excellent. We remove the high myoglobin, brown fat laden muscle, since it concentrates nasty stuff, too, via the high unoccupied hydrogen bond sites.in this burst activity muscle band.
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