tonymull wrote:
A. Most hooked salmon will live to spawn... I have seenpretty badly injured fish on the spawning redds with treble hook spoons, net wounds, seal bites, bear gashes, missing fins, eyes, chunks of flesh...and they were still spawning. So don't worry much about that. I catch many many more than I eat so I use hooks with barbs crushed down just to make release a bit easier...besides you will eventually hook yourself ;-)
Best way is to take a pressure cooker and can your fish in jars and then ship UPS to someone who won't eat it all before you get back. Use some bubble wrap. You can smoke it yourself up there too and then can it. A Little Chief is not expensive nor very bulky. Or.. freeze hard a whole RV freezer full, pack in a fish box and ship UPS overnight...$25 or so. Don't can Halibut, take my word for it. Gotta freeze them and ship. With sockeye fillets $12/lb at the store and Halibut at $22+/lb. you can afford to pay some shipping, don't you think?? I have never had a problem bringing fish back from BC to WA... If you need to get your fish frozen, ask around, you can usually find somewhere that will freeze and store for a few days or a buck or two per fish. IMHO Pinks are only good eaten the day you catch them. Last time up, last week, I just vaccum packed and froze fillets hard, packed them in my luggage insulated with some bubble wrap and flew from Anchorage to Seattle with 25 lbs of sockeye fillets (about a dozen fish). They were still rock hard.
I have never smoked fish....how long can you keep it after smoking and how do you store it?
