A Sardinian Feast
A Sardinian feast in Disco Bay
Thanksgiving came early out on Discovery Bay, where hungry carnivores have been feasting for more than a month.
It started in mid-October, when the sea began to stir and simmer in Discovery Bay just outside the Cape George Marina. A couple days later, it was frothing with swarms of squawking gulls and cormorants, harbor seals and sea lions. A school of porpoise showed up, dancing merrily as they gorged themselves. There were unconfirmed reports of a couple of orcas joining in on the fun.
Obviously, something mighty tasty and nutritious had appeared on the biological menu. But exactly what?
Jack Schirting, a retired history professor and Cape George’s angler extraordinaire, was intrigued. Over a few days, he watched the feeding frenzy move into the shallow marina itself, where untold thousands of silvery 8-to10-inch fish schooled under and around the docks, desperately trying to evade their predators..
Herring, he thought. The herring are back.
Discovery Bay was once the home to one of Puget Sound’s richest runs of spawning herring. But the run diminished and virtually disappeared in the 1990s.
But these fish had dark spots and a deeply-forked tail – very unherringlike. Puzzled, Schirting grabbed a light rod and some treble hooks, snagged a few fish, studied them and took them over the Port Townsend Marine Science Center for identification. Folks there seemed to agree: Those fish are Pacific sardines.
Sardines! In Puget Sound? .jpg)
Biologically speaking, herring and sardines are closely related. But herring gravitate toward colder, northern waters from here to Alaska. Sardines, known to scientists as sardinops sagax, prefer warmer climes – the coastal waters of central and southern California and the Baja Peninsula. These are the fish that made Monterey’s Cannery Row famous – until the sardines all but disappeared some 60 years ago.
Like herring, sardines are a schooling fish, six to 12 inches long, silvery with a blue or green tint to the scales. They spawn in warm waters, a female producing up to 200,000 eggs. And they are believed to live up to 12 years.
Recently they’ve been making a comeback. Scientists estimate that more than 1 million tons – several billion fish – now swim up and down the West Coast.
And it turns out that some of them – perhaps 10 percent – migrate north to feed in the chilly, nutrient-rich waters off Vancouver Island. Canadians have noted their seasonal visits for some years – but always in coastal areas, not inland
Their arrival in Discovery Bay came as a surprise to state biologists. Dan Penttila, a state fisheries biologist who monitors local waters, reports no sign of the species in annual surveys around sardinian biology was of little interest down on the docks at Cape George, where word spread and the local pensioners started showing up at the marina with their rods and plastic buckets, snagging sardines on unbaited hooks.
Catching them was easy – like, well, shootin’ fish in a barrel. But then what? What does one do with a fresh sardine?
One fisherman soaked them for a while, then fried them like trout. Not bad, he reported. Another was pickling them.
And Schirting? He used them for crab bait.
