Following a Wild Salmon From Sea to Plate

On a lonely skiff in Bristol Bay, a five-pound salmon thrashes under my gloves as I wrestle it out of the gill net. It’s 10 p.m. in Alaska, where I’ve joined a crew of three aboard the Baby Seal, a 23-foot commercial fishing boat. The sockeye, still chrome-bright from the sea, glitters under the setless sun. Its mouth gapes, and a gold-and-black eye meets mine. 

“Grab it by the head — you can pull it through this way,” says Corey Arnold, captain of the Baby Seal. My hand shaking, I jam my thumb in a notch behind the gills. With my other hand, I slide a metal pick between fish and net, prying it through. 

Slimy and flapping, the salmon feels like a greased, oceangoing piglet in my novice hands. My heart is racing, and my tendons scream. When it finally pops free, I fumble, and it flops around my boots. I pick it up and muster the next awful step: I thread my finger through a feathery ring of gills — and rip. 

Blood spills onto my gloves and drips down my bibs. This — bleeding out — must happen to every animal we eat. Skip this step, and the flesh will taste bad. But doing it rakes me inside, the same pain I feel when my kid skins his knee.

“Your first fish!” a crewmate chirps. I smile, fighting tears. Quietly, so the crew won’t hear, I whisper the thing I say to every trout I land on a fly rod: “Thank you, fish!”

This is one moment of truth on my yearlong quest: to learn the provenance of my salmon. The searing revelation of this moment? Whatever I pay in the store … it’s worth it! Salmon fishing is hard.

From the grocery store to the source

My journey began in a grocery store near my home in Boise, Idaho. News of declining salmon runs had me anxious about what kind of salmon to buy, or whether to eat it at all. I wanted to be an informed consumer, to research my options and make a choice that reconciled my values and my budget. 

I scrutinized labels, read the fine print, and started asking questions. A blue logo — “Responsible Choice” — appeared on some packaging at my local Albertsons. Other labels promised “Certified Sustainable Seafood.” I asked seafood-counter employees what these logos meant. 

“Buzzwords,” one told me (incorrectly). “Just marketing.” 

“I don’t trust them,” said another at a different store. 

Hoping for traceability, I scanned a QR code on a package of “Responsible Choice” frozen sockeye. It opened the grocery store’s home page.

Flummoxed, I bought chicken. And vowed to learn more. 

If I couldn’t trace my fish back to the source, what could I learn if I switched directions? Could I follow a salmon from net to plate? 

Where wild salmon swim in abundance

On my flight to Alaska in July, the peak of sockeye season, I sit next to two commercial fishermen. I mention I am going to briefly join a setnetting crew. They share a pro tip: After a day of picking fish from a gill net, I should sleep with my hands taped flat to a board so they won’t seize into claws. 

I’ve chosen Alaska for my salmon quest because I want to witness natural abundance. The world’s largest self-sustaining wild salmon runs are sockeye returning to Bristol Bay, “the mother lode of wild Alaskan salmon,” as one fisherman puts it. About the size of Virginia, Bristol Bay is the easternmost pocket of the Bering Sea, the vast cold stretch of ocean between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. All five species of Pacific salmon live here: sockeye, king, coho, pink, and keta. 

Every summer, around 50 million salmon swim through Bristol Bay on a homecoming journey that stirs me with awe. After years in the ocean as eating machines, salmon feel the primal call of their natal stream. Navigating thousands of miles through the ocean, from as far away as Japan, each fish finds the mouth of the particular river where it first tasted saltwater. 

When they return to freshwater, homecoming salmon stop eating and transform from silver “brights” to deeper colors like olive and red. Their flesh grows pale, and the flavor changes. Males grow a hooked jaw — a kype — for fighting. Guided by the singular scent of their birth stream, they find their way home, sometimes to within yards of where they hatched. There, they mate, bury eggs in the gravel, and die. 

Spawning salmon are genetic Olympians, the fittest of the fit. They’ve survived the orcas, bears, seals, otters, eagles, and 132 other species that find them delicious, including (and especially) humans, with our gauntlet of seiners, trawlers, trollers, nets, rods, spears, and weirs. Indigenous tribes view salmon not as resources but as life sources. Salmon don’t just feed the top of the food chain: Their decomposing bodies fertilize streams and feed bugs that will one day nourish baby salmon. 

A day in the life of a fisherman

For humans, getting to Bristol Bay is another kind of adventure. Like much of Alaska, it’s enveloped by roadless wilderness. A bush pilot flies me to Graveyard Point, the summer base camp for around 120 commercial fishermen. That’s where I’ll find Captain Corey (a photographer who’s based in White Salmon, Washington, when he isn’t hauling in sockeye). 

As we soar over the tundra in a single-engine monoplane barely wider than my duffel, the pilot points out caribou, beluga whales — “They look like marshmallows!” — and a solitary bear, likely fishing for salmon. 

Gazing down at the blue Kvichak River, one of nine major rivers converging in Bristol Bay, I notice two uninterrupted shadowy lines undulating in the shallows along either shore. They’re salmon superhighways, with tens of thousands of sockeye parading upstream in unison. The abundance takes my breath away. The numbers are almost unfathomable. If a bear stood in one spot for an hour, forty thousand salmon would swim past its nose. 

At the mouth of the river, Bristol Bay engulfs the horizon, its khaki waters dotted with fishing boats. Tiny figures look up from their nets and do a whole-arm wave. “There’s my cousin!” says the pilot, dipping a wing.

We land on the gray, hard-packed sands of the beach. A welcome crew loads me and my duffel on an ATV and drives me through what might be described as a ghost town if it weren’t thrumming with people. In the early 20th century, Graveyard Point was a salmon cannery. After it closed in 1957, it sat abandoned until the fishermen claimed it as a seasonal home. The buildings are off the grid, lit by generators and heated by woodstoves. Some have plumbing. Others have outhouses and rainwater barrels for tightly rationed cold showers. 

We rumble up to Mermaid Tavern, a two-story labyrinth of weathered wood that serves as Corey’s fish camp. Fishing nets in need of repair are spread out in a room lit by windows that haven’t seen glass in years. Spray-painted on the wall, an eternal truth: “The tide waits for no man.”

I haul my bag to the shared quarters in the cavelike attic, pull on my Orvis fly-fishing waders, then layer on the official Alaska uniform: Grundéns fishing bibs, Xtratuf boots, vinyl gloves, and a borrowed hunter-orange raincoat credibly seasoned with fish blood and slime. Someone radios Corey and ferries me across the bay to the Baby Seal, an aluminum skiff where he and two crew members are picking fish out of a net. 

Setnetting is salmon fishing the hard way

I’m an angler, but before this trip, I had no idea how many ways there are to catch salmon. Purse seiners encircle a school of salmon with a giant net that cinches like a coin purse. Drift netters unfurl gill nets that hang vertically, like drapes, and flow with the ocean currents. Trollers have long poles that angle out like butterfly wings, towing lines that hook fish individually. Trawlers drag cone-shaped nets along the ocean floor or mid-water, then sort the catch on deck. (Everyone loves to hate trawlers. Especially other fishermen.)

Setnetters are, as Corey explained, “the little guys.” Working on skiffs — small open-bow boats with no shade, bathrooms, or sleeping quarters — they anchor one side of a gill net on shore, then pull it taut, like a tennis net, across the salmon superhighway. Salmon swim into the gill net, which snags their gills so they can’t back out. Unlike seiners and trawlers, gill netters must remove each fish by hand. 

On Corey’s boat, I learn what it’s like to race the tide, sloshing through the mud to wrestle live fish from the net. Rushing escalates risk. Fingers get lost. Limbs can be tangled in ropes or snagged in nets. When the mud refuses to release my boots, I lose my balance and start to fall — in slapstick slow-motion — into the frigid waters. A crewmate grabs me just in time, before I flood my waders.

Out here, clocks mean nothing. Time revolves around tides, oscillating runs, and moving a perishable product quickly through a complicated supply chain. Fish must be iced within two hours of catching, so we zip across the bay and tie up to the Inaliq, a tender that can hold 20,000 fish — around 80,000 pounds — in refrigerated seawater. Our catch is amassed in brailer bags, an Alaska invention with coated mesh to protect the fish and prevent bruising. 

The crew aboard the tender lifts each bag from our boat with a crane. They weigh it, credit Corey’s account, and release the fish into their hold. In a few hours, they’ll start heading to the processing plant in Naknek, a regional fish-processing hub around three and a half hours away by boat, where a disassembly line of humans and machines will gut, fillet, vacuum-pack, and flash-freeze the fish for shipping to the Lower 48. 

Watching our catch pour into the tender, I realize why traceability is a challenge. Corey’s salmon are commingling with fish from other boats. They’ll mix with fish from other tenders at the processing plant. The processor will affix the labels of brands that will distribute them to stores. Corey doesn’t even know which companies buy his fish, or where they send it. My plan of following a fish from net to plate appears to be a pipe dream. 

One fisherman’s quest to fix the system

Then I meet Reid Ten Kley, a third-generation Bristol Bay setnetter. He wanted to feed actual people — not an industrial supply chain — and saw an opportunity to reimagine the system.

Back home in Portland, Oregon, Reid noticed a void in the frozen-fish aisle. “I couldn’t find Bristol Bay sockeye in any of the Portland grocery stores,” he says. “Most of it was being exported to Europe and Japan.” 

Around 2004, he noticed that community-supported agriculture (CSA) co-ops were thriving and wondered, why not create a salmon CSA? “I wanted to build a direct accountability between the fisherman and consumer,” he tells me.

Reid and his family then launched the Iliamna Fish Co., pioneering the community-supported fisheries (CSF) movement. They use skiffs and setnets like Corey’s but employ their own tender to retain the chain of custody of their fish and guarantee its traceability, distributing the fish directly around the United States to the 5,300 members of their CSF. 

Before I fly out of Graveyard Point, Reid plucks two sockeye from his net. He tags one with a note and sends it on the tender. The manager at the processing plant will set it aside to await my arrival by plane. Reid hands me the second fish, a backup, still wet and iridescent, slipping it into a white garbage bag — my carry-on for the 15-minute flight. 

My fish and I board a 1955 Cessna 170, a two-seater flown by Reid’s cousin Levi. As we soar over the mouth of the Naknek River, I count at least two dozen tenders waiting to unload at the processing plants. In the winter, a few hundred people live in Naknek. During fishing season, seasonal workers swell the population by thousands. 

What it takes to turn fish into fillets

At Leader Creek Fisheries, general manager David Miller hands me a white coat, a hairnet, and earplugs, then leads me on a tour to see how fish become fillets. 

Tenders tie up at the processor’s docks, where a tube sucks salmon out of the hold and pumps them into a room-sized vat of slush ice, where they “rest” for six to eight hours to let their muscles relax. Then, one by one, they ride a conveyor belt through a series of stations where machines and human hands methodically dismantle them. 

I’m surprised by how many people are involved, looking for bruising or gaping flesh, tweezing stray pin bones. Most seasonal workers are young and from the Lower 48. They work 12- to 16-hour shifts for weeks. There are no days off, but with overtime, they can earn more than $1,000 a week. Beyoncé plays in the background, over the hissing, beeping machines. “The workers get to pick their music,” Miller says.

The line moves so fast that keeping track of my two fish would be a shell game. So they’re hand-filleted by Casey from North Carolina and Chandler from Seattle. My fillets rejoin the line to be vacuum sealed, but we grab them before they head to flash-freezing to ensure they won’t get lost. 

Reid’s fish are frozen within 12 to 36 hours of being caught. They’re loaded onto barges for a 16-day trip to Seattle; trucked to Bellingham, Washington; inspected; transported to Portland, Oregon, where they’re inspected again, boxed, and distributed. 

My fillets will get an economy-class upgrade, packed in Reid’s carry-on luggage when he flies back home to Portland. In September, 71 days from now, he’ll hand them to a customer who has agreed to meet me and share the culinary fate of my sockeye. 

Before I leave Leader Creek, a familiar logo catches my eye. Open Nature — a brand sold in my local Albertsons. And there’s that blue label: “Responsible Choice.” Those fishmongers back home must not know: This label does mean something.

Wild versus farmed salmon

Like most Americans, I’m accustomed to cooking Atlantic salmon, which has fatty flesh and a mild taste. It is the species most abundant in grocery stores — and it is functionally extinct in the wild. The few wild Atlantic salmon runs left in the United States are found in a handful of rivers in Maine and listed under the Endangered Species Act. A few wild runs persist in Europe. None are abundant enough to support commercial fishing. 

That means every Atlantic salmon fillet I’ve ever eaten was farmed. I’ve always preferred it to the bolder flavor and firmer, drier texture of wild sockeye. But I’m not alone. Of the 8.8 billion pounds of salmon (all species) produced worldwide, 82% is farmed. Most of that is Atlantic salmon farmed in Norway (54%) or Chile (26%).  

That surprises me. But this shocks me: In the U.S., 97% of salmon produced (all species) is wild-caught, thanks to the abundance of Alaska’s wild sockeye. But when it comes to consumption, we mostly buy farmed Atlantic salmon — two-thirds of which is imported. 

In other words, nearly all the salmon we produce is wild, and we export it. Most of the salmon we eat is farmed, but in other countries. If I want to support small-scale fishermen and self-sustaining wild runs, wild salmon — specifically sockeye from Bristol Bay — is the best and simplest choice I can make in line with my values. 

But first, I need to learn how to cook it.

Learning to cook wild salmon

It takes a charter plane and a helicopter to get me to Tutka Bay Lodge on Kachemak Bay, toward the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula. Run by Kirsten and Mandy Dixon, a mother-daughter team of James Beard Award–nominated chefs, this luxury base camp combines outdoor adventure with hyperlocal cuisine (think: salmon with fiddlehead fern buds plucked from the forest and sea lettuce foraged in tidepools). 

My first lesson is with chef Nick Wells, and I level with him: Since discarding my Teflon pans to avoid forever chemicals, I have never been able to pan-sear salmon with the golden crust I get in restaurants. My fish always burns or sticks to the pan. 

Wells recommends a nonstick pan for cooking fish. But I ask him to prove it’s possible in a non-nonstick pan. He turns on the gas stove and preheats a cast-iron skillet, then adds a tablespoon of canola oil, which has a high smoke point. (My first mistake: using olive oil, which smokes at lower temperatures.) 

He cranks the gas stove to high. (Second mistake: medium heat, which fails to properly sear.) When the oil shimmers and the pan begins to smoke, he turns the heat completely off, then slides in a fillet, flesh side down. It sizzles. He gives the pan a forceful shove, and the salmon glides. He turns the heat to medium-high and places a Chef’s Press weight atop the fillet, explaining that pressure creates an even sear and crisp crust. Invented by one of his biggest inspirations, the San Francisco chef Bruce Hill, these stackable weights are vented (unlike a burger press), which prevents the crust from steaming. 

That’s it? Almost. After flipping the fish, Nick adds two pats of butter to the pan. It melts quickly, and he rapid-bastes the fillets, which accelerates cooking. The butter browns and adds richness, an especially good technique for lean species like sockeye.  

My second lesson begins with a water taxi across Kachemak Bay to Homer. There, I meet chef Kirsten Dixon. She takes me on a tour of a town where everyone is connected — and also connected to fishing.

At the farmers market, we meet Aaron Sechler, aka Citizen Salmon, a one-man boutique processor. He buys fish on the docks, fillets them by hand with tremendous care, and sells them to local restaurants and mail-order customers all over the U.S. His salmon is on the menu at Johnny’s Corner, a lunch spot started by a seiner who gave up a life at sea for love. Johnny’s girlfriend, an artist with a fillet knife, processes halibut for charter boat customers flying home with coolers of fish. 

Kirsten and I drive around town, shopping for all five species of Pacific salmon. It’s peak season for sockeye and keta, the start of the pink salmon runs, a little too early for coho, and almost too late for kings. We find everything fresh except coho. That one we have to defrost.

We find chef Tim Crockett in Kirsten’s kitchen, where we inspect the fillets side by side. It’s remarkable how much they differ in color, size, and texture. King salmon, the largest, is silky and veined with fat. Sockeye is the darkest. Coho, keta, and pink are paler and less firm.

Tim pan-sears the fillets with precision, producing a crisp, golden crust while leaving the inside sashimi-rare. He seasons them with only salt and pepper and doesn’t baste them with butter. We taste them side by side. 

King is my favorite, with its mild flavor, silky texture, and rich fat content. My next choice is coho, light and mild. I’m still developing a taste for the assertive flavor of sockeye, but I realize I’ve misjudged it as “dry” because I’ve been overcooking it. I’m delighted by the mild flavor and delicate texture of pinks, which usually end up in a can. I’m even more surprised at keta (frequently called chum). It is mild and flaky, a neutral slate for all kinds of sauces and flavors. Keta could be my new tilapia. 

When I leave, I take samples to Frank and Suzanne Alioto, good friends who live in Kenai. Pastor Frank, an Eagle Scout who officiated my wedding, agrees to a blind taste test. We close our eyes, and his teenage daughter feeds us a bite of each species. I guess three out of five correctly. I don’t want to throw a pastor under the bus, so let’s just say Frank is happy to find that keta and pink — two salmon he has rarely (or never) cooked — are more agreeable than he expected. 

On my final night in Alaska, I meet a friend for dinner in Anchorage and see Copper River salmon on the menu. Salmon bound for this river, which flows into the Gulf of Alaska, are called out by name on menus worldwide. Restaurants in the Pacific Northwest bid for the honor of serving the first one of the season. Because of their epic migration — 300 upstream miles, climbing as much as 3,600 feet in elevation — these wild salmon evolved to be extra fat and strong to survive the journey. 

The end of my salmon’s journey — and mine

After two weeks of eating salmon, I really want to order the halibut. But I have to know: Does Copper River salmon live up to the hype? One bite and I’m certain: It does. This Copper River king is meltingly tender, its flavor more subtly decadent than any salmon I’ve ever tasted. No wonder it’s called “the Wagyu of seafood.” Unlike Wagyu cattle, however, these free-range salmon breed, roam, and feed themselves in the wild. 

In September, back home in Idaho, I get a call from Captain Corey. “The salmon are running!” Do I want to go fishing on the Columbia River? Of course I do! Corey’s caveat: He may be a professional sockeye fisherman in Alaska, but he’s a novice at sport-fishing for kings in his own home river. 

It’s a six-hour drive from Boise to White Salmon, a tiny bluff town in Washington, across the gorge from Hood River, Oregon. The town was named for the White Salmon River, a 44-mile tributary filled with salmon, trout, and whitewater kayaks. The river was christened by Lewis and Clark, who witnessed Indigenous fishermen catching its ivory-fleshed salmon — a genetic variation that turns up in some kings. 

In the inky hours before dawn, the Columbia glows with the red-and-green navigation lights of recreational fishing boats. 

By the time we launch midmorning, kiteboarders are skimming across the gorge. All around us, hundreds of kings are rolling on the surface. We see other boats catching them, but after three hours, we head in with an empty cooler. Skunked. 

White Salmon is, coincidentally, the final stop of the sockeye I’ve been tracking from Bristol Bay. It will land on the plate of Deb Lawless, one of the town’s 2,500-odd residents. I arrange to meet her at a local café, where I find myself surrounded by the town’s mascot — there are salmon on delivery trucks, stenciled in the crosswalks, painted on a fence across the street.

Deb turns out to be a Canadian expat with a winsome smile. In season, she buys fresh salmon from local tribal fishermen. Out of season, she buys from Reid Ten Kley and his family, as she has for nearly a decade. “I want to support my local community,” she says. Like me, she went to Alaska to witness salmon in abundance.

A week after our meeting, Deb defrosts my sockeye. It’s harvest season on Underwood Mountain, where her friends own Loop de Loop winery. She and her husband like to pitch in, walking the vineyards and measuring Brix, the sugar level of grapes. At the end of a long day, they season the salmon with olive oil, sea salt, and pepper, then grill it alongside fresh peaches. They toast to the beginning of autumn and the end of my salmon’s journey. 

Meanwhile, I drive back to White Salmon one last time, with my teenage son. We’re going salmon fishing. 

We climb aboard our guide’s boat before dawn and troll the mile-wide Columbia as the alchemy of sunrise turns metallic water to molten gold. I hook the first salmon, a 10-pound “tule” king. Preparing to spawn, she’s already red, which means she won’t taste great. I let her go. My son lands a 9-pound “up-river bright” as chrome as a vintage car bumper, and then a small precocial male called a jack. We keep both.

Then my rod bends with a gravity I have never felt in freshwater. This is not just a fish, but the fish — the kind worthy of dreams and stories. Heart racing, I brace the rod on my hip and try to match its power. It runs, the reel sings, and the world disappears. 

“Fish of a lifetime!” my fishing guide yells as we haul it in the boat. “Biggest fish of the season!” A wild male, this king spent one year in freshwater and three years in the ocean before hearing the call of its natal stream. 

When it’s over, I barely have the strength to hold my king up for a photo. It fought so hard to live. Ripping a gill and seeing its blood still rakes the inside of my ribs. But I’ll never forget this fish or its journey, and how it dovetailed with mine.

Thank you, fish.