Here she is, waiting for her makeover. Come on sunshine!!!

I really don’t want to talk about the boat or the crab season we are missing out on right now, so instead I’m going to post a crab recipe.  Because, how do I distract myself from unpleasant realities?  I eat!

This is a fairly simple recipe for a red spaghetti sauce, but with the addition of crab meat.  Delicious, trust me!

Crab Spaghetti

1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium sized onion, finely chopped

6 cloves of garlic, chopped

3/4 tsp crushed red chile flakes

2 tsp dried basil, or about 8 leaves of fresh basil, chopped

1 tsp dried oregano (or parsley)

1 tsp celery seeds (you can use celery salt if that’s all you have)

1/4 cup half and half

2 – 28 ounce cans of whole peeled tomatoes, undrained

1 pound spaghetti noodles

1 to 2  pounds cooked and cleaned crab meat

salt and pepper, to taste

Heat olive oil in a large pan over medium low heat, add onion, garlic, celery seeds, basil, oregano, and chile flakes.  Stir and cook until onions are soft and translucent, around 10 minutes.  Pour into a blender and add tomatoes (with the juice from the can) and half and half.  Puree until almost smooth (I like mine a little chunky still), then pour back into pan and continue cooking over medium heat for another 30-35 minutes.  Throw the crab meat in and cook for a couple more minutes, until the crab is heated through.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

While the sauce is simmering, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add spaghetti noodles.  Cook noddles until al dente and drain.

Toss the noodles with the sauce and serve garnished with fresh chopped basil or parsley.

This is based on a recipe from Saveur magazine.  Here is the original recipe.

I wish I had photos to post of this delicious dish, but all it really looks like is spaghetti with red sauce.  It tastes WAY better than it looks.  You will just have to try it out and see for yourself.  If you live on the West coast, find yourself some fresh dungeness crab.

If you need a lesson on cleaning dungeness crab, watch this video from the F/V Refuge out of Newport, Oregon.

Enjoy!

doggy doo-doo in my living room!

I apologize to any squeamish readers, but I felt like I needed to illustrate the scene that I woke up to this morning (for fear of being accused of exagerating).  This is dog diarrhea (from a mastiff no less).  On the carpet.  Unfortunantely, this was only one of the many, many, many puddles that covered our floor.  I can only assume that the dog was very concerned about the gunk streaming out of her butt and, in an attempt to escape from it, paced nervously around the house, dribbling and tracking it from room to room.  The smell of it woke me up and when I opened my bedroom door I was stopped in my tracks by brown puddles and drops all over the landing and into the kid’s room.  I followed the trail down the stairs, hopping from one patch of clean carpet to another.  Somehow the dog managed to land some on 11 out of 16 stairs!  The living room was the epicenter of the disaster, with the big pile in the photo, but as I crept from room to room I found poo in every single space of the house, including the kitchen, dining room and bathroom.

“Take deep breaths,” I kept telling myself, “don’t lose it in front of the kids, don’t scream.”  I kept the obscenities under my breath.

I made the kids stay in my bedroom while I covered all the brown spots with paper towels (I didn’t know what else to do!), then carried the kids, one by one, through the mine field and sat them at the dining room table to eat breakfast.  While they ate I tried to formulate a game plan.  I got out the phone book and started calling carpet cleaners in the area. Bad timing!  We are in the middle of a winter storm and pretty much every business in the area is closed today.  And the icy roads and gusting winds mean that I am essentially stuck at home too.  A very nice woman I talked to at Chem-Dry assured me they would send the cleaners as soon as the weather warmed up, which would be tomorrow at the very earliest, maybe the next day.  So, I got out a bucket and cleaning products and had a momentary shock when I turned on the faucet and no water came out.  ”Why is this happening to me?” I was just starting to panic when the water unfroze itself and began flowing again.

As you can see, we don't have much snow, but here in the Northwest everything shuts down when it snows a couple inches

When the kids finished breakfast I carried them to the couch (no poo on the couch, luckily) and put on a movie for them.  ”Stay here and don’t move!”  Television is really the only way to keep my 3 and 5 year old boys from running wild around the house, so it comes in handy with situations like this.  Normally the kids would have been in preschool all afternoon, which would have given me some free time to deal with this, but the schools were closed because of the snow.

It is night time now and the kids are in bed.  I have been scrubbing and blotting crap out of the carpets all day.  The last of the mess had started to dry onto the carpets, so while it’s soaking in Oxy-Clean I thought I’d come write a blog post and vent about the misery of being the wife of an absent fisherman.

The timing of this post is appropriate because of a conversation I had with a friend the other day.  This friend was asking me whether I felt comfortable being completely honest in my writing.  She commented that when I described my situation to her (how my life has gone to shit) my tone was different from the tone I take in my blog posts.  I tried to explain that I like to take a fairly positive tone in my blog for fear of seeming whiny and pathetic.  I don’t want my blog to be about “poor me.”  But our conversation got me thinking about my situation and the way I convey it to others.  I know I like people to see me as being strong and in control, but that really isn’t who I am.

People often ask me how things are going with the boat, and how I’m doing on my own with the kids.  My response usually goes along the lines of “Oh, things are going slower than expected with the boat, but it’s coming along.  I’m hanging in there.”  Which often elicits a response from the other person like, “I don’t know how you do it, you always seem so calm.”

Well, I think this is a good opportunity to be completely honest and personal in my writing…  I AM NOT OK!!!  If I seem calm on the outside, just know that inside part of me is FREAKING OUT!!! Our boat purchase turned out to be a total nightmare.  As we took things apart we found one problem after another.  We are now seriously over budget and out of time.  Zed hasn’t even left Alabama yet and the dungeness crab season is about to start in a few days.  We will miss the start of the season and we WILL run out of money before Zed starts fishing.  At home the kids are driving me crazy.  I’ve lost track of how long Zed has been gone, but I think it’s close to three months now.  It will be another month before he’s back in the state, and then several months of crabbing before either of us gets a break.  Now you see why episodes like today’s doo-doo explosion nearly send me over the edge.

Ahhhh (that’s a sigh of relief), now that that’s off my chest I can relax a little.  My life isn’t all bleak, it’s just tough at the moment.  But on the bright side we will soon have a very nice fishing boat and the potential to increase our income substantially.  It’s the American Dream really.  We are working hard and suffering through this period in order to better our future.  After days like today I have to remind myself to step back and look at the bigger picture.  A little (actually, a lot of) doggy diarrhea is not that big of a deal when I consider what hardships other families are dealing with.  We have the means to make money, we have a home, and we are all healthy, and that is a lot to be thankful for.

That is what I will keep repeating to myself as I spend the next couple hours scrubbing the stairs.  I will try not to curse the combination of pets and carpeting, and instead daydream about the end of the crab season and a much needed vacation.  Now PLEASE let the weather warm up so the carpet cleaners can come to the rescue!

It has been a difficult couple months for our family, especially being separated over the holidays.  We spent Thanksgiving apart, and then our first ever Christmas apart.  Yesterday was our oldest son’s 5th birthday, and Zed had to wish him a happy birthday over the phone…  We used Skype on Christmas so the boys could talk to their dad and show him their new presents.  And since Zed and I both have iPhones, we can use “face time” to have family video chats.

Atticus waiting patiently for a slice of birthday cake

In case you are wondering, Zed is still in Alabama working on the boat.  It turns out, converting a shrimper to a crabber is not as simple as we anticipated, but the work is almost done!

One of the major differences between shrimp boats in the South and crab boats on the West coast is the hold.  Where we have “wet” tanks that can be filled with water, most shrimpers in the South have “dry” tanks that are not water-proofed.  To convert our boat to a crab boat, we first needed to reinforce the hold so that it could handle the extra weight of all that water, and then we had to fiberglass the entire hold.  First, old foam needed to be ground smooth before new foam could be sprayed on.  This first photo shows foam being sprayed on all the surfaces.

spray foaming the fish hold

Here is Zed, getting ready to grind some foam.  Pretty attractive getup huh?

shipyard fashion

This next photo shows the foam being ground smooth.  Next will come the fiberglass.

grinding foam, dust everywhere!

Another necessary part of a crab boat is a dump box, where the crab are dumped out of the pots.  Here is our brand new dump box.

shiny new custom dump box

Exposed wires needed to be protected and water-proofed, so a solid run was installed from the lazarette to the engine room.

the installation of the housing for the wiring

Meanwhile, back in Bellingham a crew has been working daily rigging the dungeness crab gear.  Buoys have been painted, branded and tied, and line has been measured and cut. New crab pots were just delivered a couple days ago and sit waiting to be filled with buoys and lengths of line.

stacks of new pots

piles of line and buoys

Hopefully the F/V Robin Blue (yes, the boat is named after me) will soon be splashed into the Gulf of Mexico and headed to her new hometown of Bellingham, Washington.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us, including months of crabbing, but I’m feeling optimistic about our future and looking forward to a time (months from now) when we can relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

On that note, I wish everyone a Happy New Year, filled with new beginnings, fresh starts, and opportunity for a happier future!

I was looking forward to the adventure, so I’m kind of bummed out about our change of plans.  But if there is one thing I’ve learned being a fisherman’s wife, it’s the importance of being adaptable and flexible.  Commercial fishing is a very unpredictable industry.  Everything in fishing is a gamble, so you must be prepared to change your plans constantly and deal with ups and downs.  When Zed leaves on the fishing boat we don’t know when we will see each other again, how much money he will make, or if he will come back with all his fingers intact.  I can’t count the number of times we have had to cancel vacations and return tickets.  Sometimes this is the result of a change in the fishing schedule, or sometimes a bad season means we don’t have the funds to carry out our plans.  If ever we make a plan, chances are we will have to change it… several times.

Some welding going down in the shipyard

For example, when we bought our fishing boat last month, we were planning on all the improvements and conversions on the boat to take a couple weeks.  Well, problems with the shipyard we started at required that we move the boat to another shipyard and that set us back a whole week.  Lost paperwork, slow offices, ordering parts, fiberglass – all these unforeseen setbacks have cost us valuable time.

here she is, sitting high and dry in the shipyard

Our change of plan also means that, in addition to the weeks that Zed has spent in Alabama working on the boat, I will have another month on my own until he gets back here.      And Zed will spend a month at sea, away from his family, only to return and immediately start crabbing.  We are all making huge sacrifices right now, all on the hope that we will have a good crab season and pay back some of this money we are borrowing!  I guess you can’t get ahead in life without taking some risks, right?

This is a very simple recipe that could be prepared quickly,

I recommend using english cucumbers.  Want to make them look prettier? -top each cucumber slice with a little leaf of dill or parsley.  Any type of small cracker would work, but if you want to make these gluten-free, use rice crackers.  I have quite a few friends and family members who are gluten intolerant, so I would make these with rice crackers.

I’m working on some more holiday seafood recipes, so stay tuned in the next couple weeks …

This is the cost of Alabama and you can see Bayou La Batre on the left…

In a couple weeks I will fly down with the boys and join Zed.  We will get supplies and cruise south, following the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico.  We will cut across the Caribbean to Panama, pass through the Panama Canal, then finally head north, back to Bellingham, Washington.  We expect this trip to take about a month.

I am excited, but very nervous at the same time… I have never done anything like this before.  Well I’ve traveled plenty but I have never driven or navigated a boat and I tend to get seasick (blechhh).  Plus, I have all the usual nagging worries of a mother – I am thinking to myself “What if the kids fall overboard, what if the boat breaks down, what if someone gets sick, what if we are attacked by pirates?”  I can’t stop my mind from running through every possible scenario and horror story.

To combat my nerves I have been making lists of things to take with us.  Grocery lists, clothing lists, toiletries, emergency supplies, cooking supplies, cleaning supplies, etc…  It might be slightly neurotic of me, but afterall, if we forget something it’s not like we can just run to the store and pick it up.  We are only planning on docking a couple times on the whole trip so we better not forget or run out of anything important (like food!).

I try to think of all the positives instead.  Like the fact that our whole family will be together for an entire month, uninterrupted (something that rarely happens anymore).  We will be getting some serious quality time together.  I am also excited about the prospect of an adventure.  Zed and I used to travel quite a bit, but since having kids our lives have been pretty tame.  I’ve been feeling a little bit “stuck-in-a-rut” lately… the same schedules repeating week after week.  We usually take a little vacation every year, but this will be our first time out of the country with the kids.

Unfortunately, we will be in a mad rush to get back for the crab season and won’t really be able to stop and enjoy the tropical landscapes we will be passing through.  Before we were married, Zed and I spent two months in Central America and I think the week we spent in Panama might have been my favorite part of the whole trip.  Panama has amazingly lush scenery and wildlife, but isn’t nearly as expensive or touristy as it’s northern neighbor, Costa Rica.  We had an awesome week of snorkeling, swimmimg and island living.  This time we will be rushing right past those white sandy beaches and clear blue-green waters.  Oh well, at least we can soak up some sun from the boat.  Plus, I’m really excited about the cruise through the Panama Canal!  I can’t wait to pass through those giant locks with the water flooding in and out with all the giant cargo ships!

Here is a timelapse video of an entire canal crossing…

I’m going to get back to my planning and list making now, so if any of you readers out there have any advice for us on our trip I would really appreciate it.  Anyone done this before?

Last month we had a different boat we were trying to buy, and it was almost in the bag when the deal fell through at the last minute.  That was very disappointing, but we accepted it and moved on.  Then Zed spotted a boat in Alabama that caught his eye.  He flew down a couple weeks ago to check it out and it turned out better than he had hoped.

So we have been working every angle to make this sale work for us.  Because we got burned last time, I didn’t want to say anything this time until I felt confident enough to state…”WE ARE BUYING A BOAT!!!”  Well, maybe I should say “we are TRYING to buy a boat!” but it seems like it will work this time.  Yes, after weeks of loan applications and paperwork and finagling it looks like everything is coming together (thanks to enormous amounts of help from family, friends, co-workers, and from the seller of the boat).  Let me tell you, it has not been easy – this last month has been a stressful one, but I feel confident that we are making the right decision.

there she is, the Little Skinner (soon to be renamed)

If all our loans fall into place as they should, we will have a crazy-insane scramble to get the gear ready, get the boat ready and drive it from the Gulf of Mexico, down through the Panama Canal, and up the West Coast to Washington.  And all of this has to happen before the start of the dungeness crab season…  AAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I have to admit, the scale of this whole deal is a little terrifying.  We are taking on a huge debt and a huge risk, but at the same time it seems to be the logical next step in our lives.  Zed has been working as a deckhand for sixteen years now and has enough experience to run his own boat.   I think we are ready for this!

With the sale not being final, I hate to get my hopes too high, so for now I will keep my fingers crossed.  Hopefully I will be posting VERY good news VERY soon!

picture this, cruising through the Panama Canal...

On a positive note, the Pacific Hustler had it’s best set EVER on the last trip of the season – a great note to end on.  Here are some photos taken by various members of the crew.

No, they didn't catch these - just a documenting the sea life.

snarly

First it rolls one way...

...and then the other way.

not the greatest weather

but the birds don't seem to be bothered

rockin' and rollin'

Al with a flailing blackcod on the line

a sea lion trying to steal a snack

the vast Pacific Ocean

hit the jackpot!

Zed at the rail, swimming in fish

the view from above

Zed and Remo working at top speed

That's one happy crew!

"we just made a lot of money!"

the fish is on ice in the hold, time to head home!

Don’t worry, Zed shaved off that beard after he got home.  He was trying to keep growing it until Halloween so he could be Abe Lincoln (or a giant leprechaun) but he didn’t last that long.  He hates having a beard, and I can’t say I’m crazy about him having a beard either.

So, now that the blackcod season is over it is time to start thinking about dungeness crab… if everything goes well, Zed could be running his own boat this year!  We are opening a new chapter in our lives and it’s very exciting – wish us luck!

Shrimp and prawns are some of the only seafood that I will buy in the grocery store.  I love shrimp, but alas, my husband does not fish for them, so I must resort to buying them.  But lately I have been having a really hard time finding US caught shrimp in our local grocery stores.  Even as recently as a couple years ago I could easily find a selection of shrimp from different sources; some from Asia, some from South America, Mexico, and the (more expensive) US caught option.

I always check the seafood section when I go grocery shopping, but at several different grocery stores around Bellingham I have been finding nothing but farmed shrimp from Thailand.  EVERYTHING is from Thailand.  Peeled, tail-on, cooked, raw, every option, every brand = Farmed/ Thailand.  What gives?  I understand that the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery has had a rough go of it, what with the BP oil spill and all, but I was under the impression that the industry has since made a recovery.

The problem is that Thailand’s aquaculture industry has been booming in the last few years.  Thailand is now the biggest supplier of seafood to the US, and shrimp is one of the top products imported. In fact, Thailand is now the world’s biggest supplier of shrimp.  Shrimp farming has been wildly successful in Thailand, where farmers clear mangrove forests along the coasts to make way for shrimp ponds (60% of Thailand’s mangrove forests have been cleared – read Cheap Shrimp: Hidden Costs).  Due to poor farming practices, like overcrowding, the use of harsh chemicals, fertilizers, and antibiotics, these ponds are often unusable after a couple years.  The farmers then abandon the polluted ponds and move on to start new ponds along the coast.

an example of a shrimp pond, this one in South Korea

Even though Thailand has been increasing it’s environmental and health regulations, the fact is, their standards are just not the same as ours.  Don’t even get me started on their (lack of) labor laws, or the destruction done by their wild-caught shrimp fisheries.  And it’s not just Thailand – China’s fish farms have been growing at frightening speeds and they have the same disregard for environmental, labor and health regulations.

To add to the problem, only 1% of imported seafood is inspected, and only 0.1% is tested for residues of drugs that are banned in the US.  It is simply not feasible to test all seafood that comes into our country.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to eat shrimp from a country that has a reputation of feeding it’s farmed seafood with untreated animal manure and human waste (read this), I want it tested first.  And this is why I won’t eat imported shrimp, no matter how cheap it is, or any other imported seafood for that matter.  So until I find US shrimp back in the freezers at my grocery store (or even better, down in the harbor, fresh off the boat!) I will sadly not be eating any of those tasty little crustaceans, and I would advise all of you readers to do the same.  Read the fine print on the packaging – know where your seafood is coming from!

This last time I made chirashi, I used leftover salmon from the night before, which I had glazed with soy sauce and brown sugar.  Here is my recipe for the salmon…

Soy Glazed Salmon

2 lb fillet of salmon, skin on

1/4 cup of soy sauce

1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

2 TBSP olive oil

1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper

Preheat oven to 400°.  Place salmon, skin side down, in a shallow baking dish (do yourself a favor and put a layer of foil down first or you will be scraping that pan for a week!) Mix soy sauce, brown sugar, olive oil and pepper in a small bowl, then pour over salmon, making sure to coat all of the fish.  Bake the salmon in the center of the oven for about 15 minutes or until opaque all the way through.

As I said, I cooked this salmon for dinner the night before and used the leftovers for the chirashi the next day.  The whole point of the chirashi is that it is quick and easy, so feel free to use canned sockeye salmon.

Photo: Leo Gong; Styling: Robyn Valarik

Get the original recipe from MyRecipes.com

Simple Chirashi

1 lb of cooked salmon skin removed, or canned sockeye drained

1 cup of (dry) white rice, cook it according to directions on package

1 cup sliced cucumber

1 cup cubed avacado

1/2 cup chopped green onions

4 small sheets of seaweed ( I use Trader Joes seaweed snacks, 99¢ a pack) torn into small pieces

2 TBSP sesame seeds

1/4 cup soy sauce (I like reduced sodium soy sauce)

2 TBSP rice vinegar

2 TBSP wasabi powder

1/2 tsp sesame oil

Divide the cooked rice between 4 bowls.  Divide the salmon into 4 servings and place a piece on top of each bowl of rice.  Arrange cucumber, avacado, green onion, seaweed, and sesame seeds on rice with the salmon.  Make the dressing by mixing soy sauce, rice vinegar, wasabi powder and sesame oil and drizzling it over each bowl.

I like to mix everything in my bowl together, but my kids like to keep everything separate and eat each piece individually.  However you eat yours – enjoy!