Most mornings and afternoons, including today, we would see a small group, usually four in number, of sandhill cranes foraging in the meadow. We would see as many as nine, but generally four, working the open spaces along the hillside or noisily honking as they flew over.
I was sitting at the table sipping coffee and waiting for Ann to appear when Michael, knowing we had no plans for the day, asked me, “You want to go with me on a real Alaskan adventure?” Without hesitation, I said yes. Flash back to the fish that he was off obtaining when we arrived in late afternoon yesterday. His plan was to take the fish down to the public cleaning station on the Spit and break them down. At this point, he did not know that I am a retired chef who broke down fish every day of my restaurant career.
Once we got coffeed up, we followed Mike in his Subaru, festooned with all kinds of antiwar bumper stickers, down to the Spit. Before noon on a Saturday well before the charter boats would be returning, it was easy to find a spot in the first cleaning station we came to. The city of Homer maintains several cleaning stations complete with stainless steel drain boards, sprayers, and a wagon for scrap. The pavilions are wrapped in fly netting and the entrances have vinyl strip doors to help keep the bugs out, a very, very nice set up, appropriate for the Halibut Fishing Capital of the World.
The station that we used was situated right on The Nick Dudiak Fishing Lagoon, better known as The Fishing Hole. The hole is a small pond with an inlet through a breakwater into the bay. Alaska Fish and Game stocks this pond with king and silver fry which imprint on the pond, migrate to the sea, fatten up there, and then return to the lagoon to spawn. Despite scads of would-be fishermen and a few jumping fish, I never saw a fish landed in the lagoon.
We lugged Mike's cooler into the station and unloaded five red salmon (Sockeyes) and a much larger King. He got the fish off of a buddy from Seldovia across the Bay for a song, especially because the King had a chunk taken out of its head by a seal and was therefore commercially unsaleable.
I hadn’t planned on a working vacation when we came to Alaska, but I'm not averse to work and got to work, first scaling the fish and then happily filleting them. Mike's fillet knife is a bit longer than mine that I have used for 35 years, so it took a minute to get used to, but my muscle memory is good despite not having busted out a salmon in five years. I stockpiled bits and pieces of trim with a plan to make them into handrolls later in the day. A woman was happy to take the heads, guts, and carcasses to use for chumming halibut.
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| Scaling Salmon in Prep for Filleting |
After putting the cleaned fillets in the cooler on ice, Michael offered to buy as a beer. After working busting out salmon, I was plenty game for a beer. We drove down the spit a short ways to the Salty Dawg Saloon, tourist attraction of tourist attractions where at 12:30 on a Saturday, parking was almost impossible to find. In fact, Mike invented his own spot right in the middle of the lot, claiming that as a benefit of driving a beater, "Who would bang up their rental car on my beater?"
As we walked across the road to the instantly recognizable landmark, I could see that it was a hodgepodge of two tiny buildings jammed together and fronting a lighthouse tower. The Salty Dawg is so well known that whenever we mentioned Homer, the listener would inevitably say that we had to visit it.
The original building was one of the first cabins in Homer, built in 1897. It served many purposes until 1909 when a second building was added. After being the first post office, a railroad station, a grocery store, a coal mining office, a school house, and an office for Standard Oil Company, in 1957 it finally became the Salty Dawg Saloon. After the big earthquake in 1964, the buildings were moved to the current location and the iconic lighthouse tower was added between and behind them.
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| The Salty Dawg: I am Taller than the Doorway |
On ducking really low to get through the door of the tiny log structure, above the usual chatter of a dive bar packed with patrons I could hear Toby Keith belting “I Love This Bar,” which seemed pretty appropriate if a lot cliché. When my eyes became accustomed to the dim lighting, I could see that every surface was covered in dollar bills. Ann added one to the collection.
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| Customary to Leave a Dollar on the Wall |
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| We Were There |
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| Tony: Local Color |
After waiting at the very busy bar for a couple minutes, we finally got our beers from their tiny list of cans, nothing on draft. At least they had one IPA in a can. We took our drinks out on the patio and there were regaled by an old acquaintance of Michael's, flamboyant in a green Hawaiian shirt and sporting a three foot-long silver wig held in place with a bright blue scarf tied as a headband.
After we finished our drinks, Mike showed us around a bit on the boardwalk before we headed back to the house. My first impression of this part of the Homer Spit was as a typical tacky tourist attraction like many beach towns. We would get a closer look at the Spit in coming days.
Part way back to the house, Mike pulled to the side of the road and asked us if we were hungry and perhaps wanted to go get a decent sandwich. Living east of Homer, Mike lives in an enclave known as Fritz Creek. For sandwiches, he took us a mile or two beyond his house to the Fritz Creek General Store which offers a lot of things: gas, post office boxes and services, a deli, and a convenience store. We ordered sandwiches to take back to the house to eat out on the patio.
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| Fritz Creek General Store |
After lunch, I helped Mike portion and vacuum seal his salmon, then I minced all the salmon trim in preparation for making handrolls for dinner. After cleaning up, I went foraging for dinner in town at the local Save-U-More store which, surprisingly to me, sells Kirkland-labelled products from Costco.
I picked up some nori, seaweed salad, and sriracha for the handrolls, but then I fell afoul of Alaska ABC laws when I grabbed a couple of bottles of Prosecco and headed for the check out where the cashier told me emphatically that I could not purchase alcohol at his register. I had to go to the register not fifteen feet away in the part of the store that is licensed to sell alcohol. This is not the last time that I will comment on the arcane liquor laws in Alaska on this trip. In a country of crazy liquor laws—thank you Supreme Court for leaving the laws to the 50 states—Alaska is right up there on the crazy spectrum.
Back at the inn, I put together a spicy salmon mix for our handrolls and we sat on the patio in the late evening sun while I rolled the salmon. The nori sheets were of the worst possible quality and were very dry, brittle, and tasteless. I could see that Michael was not the world's biggest fan of spicy salmon, but he put a brave face on it. Liberal application of Prosecco would help.
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