Rick and Morgan at Mclean’s Shipyard, Prince Rupert
Salmon from the Pacific Provider
The Pacific Provider is owned and operated by a North Vancouver fishing family. The 43 foot boat leaves Vancouver in the late spring and returns to Vancouver in the fall. All their salmon are caught by hook and line using barbless hooks. The fish are landed by hand and cleaned immediately. They are then flash frozen on board while at sea. The boat fishes throughout Haida Gwaii and out of Prince Rupert. Rick, the skipper, mainly employs local university students as crew whenever possible. This family is committed to small scale production of a high quality product.
The Pacific Provider has Ocean Wise Certification.
Our Operation
Salmon are caught by trolling with barbless hooks, which allows the occasional bycatch to be released alive. A troller drags hooks through the water from a pole extending on either side of the boat. The hooks are baited with artificial lures and the fish are landed individually by hand as the lines are pulled in.
Immediately after each fish is landed it is processed (bled and cleaned – gills and entrails removed). Within two hours and after a second washing, the fish are passed down into the fish hold to be flash frozen.
The fish are placed on trays in front of a blast freezer. The blast freezer has a large fan that creates a wind of about 25 km per hour and cools the air to a temperature of minus 40 degrees Celsius.
Within four hours the fish are frozen to a core temperature of -28C. This process means the fish are perfectly safe to eat raw.
After the fish are frozen they are dipped three times in chilled seawater. This coats the fish in a thin layer of ice that seals in the natural moisture of the salmon and prevents freezer burn.
The salmon are then stacked in the fish hold. When the fish hold is full with approximately 8,000 pounds of salmon, the Pacific Provider leaves the fishing grounds and heads to Prince Rupert to have the fish custom offloaded. As per Department of Fisheries and Oceans regulations, the skipper must pay an independent validator to identify each salmon by species and count each fish that comes off the boat.
This ensures that the skipper and crew have kept to the conditions of the licence and that only the permitted size and species of salmon have been caught. The skipper is also required to make available upon demand from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans the head of every Chinook and Coho salmon we catch.
DNA samples are taken, and if salmon are being caught that are heading to rivers that have conservation concerns, then the areas where those fish were caught are closed to commercial fishing.
The frozen salmon are packed in large cardboard totes capable of holding 1200 pounds of fish. Each tote is identified with its own number that allows it to be tracked through the transportation and storage system and identified as Pacific Provider fish.
The salmon are shipped by freezer truck to a commercial cold storage plant in Vancouver, where they are tested to ensure they have been kept at the proper temperature during transport. The temperature of the fish is maintained in the cold storage facility at minus 27 degrees Celsius.
When these flash frozen at sea salmon are thawed, they look and taste as if they have just been caught.