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Saturday, July 31, 2010

2 days, 2 fish

On my second day in Juneau, I went out halibut fishing. Halibut are fish the live on the bottom of the ocean and are very strange fish. When they are babies, their eyes are normal with one on each side of its head. As they grow bigger, their one eye migrates over to the other side of their head. Since they live on the bottom of the ocean, this allows both eyes to face up toward everything that's happening in the ocean and doesnt waste 50% of its eyesight looking down at the mud. The picture above shows me reeling in my first big catch. It took 20 minutes to reel in 400ft of line with this huge halibut on the end.
It weighed 80 pounds!!! The captain of the boat, Mike, filleted it for me and cut it into meal sized portions. Then we shipped it over to the meat processing company where it was vacuum packed and flash frozen.
The next day, Mike invited me to go out fishing on his day off with some of his friends. I couldnt believe it, but I caught another HUGE fish! Everybody was shocked that I caught two huge fish in two days. The second one weighed 102 pounds!!!
Here is the 102 pounder being filleted. You can see that the cheek has already been removed. The cheeks are considered the delicacy.
The second one took about 15 minutes to reel in and came from about the same depth. The next day, my whole body was sore and I had bruises all over the tops of my thighs from where I had dug the rod into my leg to get leverage to help reel it in. One of my friends asked, "What you do, get in a street fight with the fish?"

6 comments:

Belle said...

Good for you! Whoa, those halibuts are big.

Cindi said...

omgoodness...wow those fish were huge!!! Congrats hopefully you'll recover quickly..I posted a new blog come by for a visit if you want
http://livingretail.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

WOW!!! Are you taking the fish home or do you have to leave it there??

edije

Tamara said...

Holy halibut, Batman! That's a huuuuuge fish!

Unknown said...

So the cheek was already removed from someone who caught it b4 and just took that part? Is that what u mean?

alisha said...

Edije...yep, taking it all home. 97 pounds of halibut fillets.

Kas...no, I took the halibut cheeks out for me!!!