An up-close epicurean angler perspective on the making of a Travel Channel special with Chef Andrew Zimmern.
It mattered to me. It mattered to Josh. It mattered to Andrew Zimmern, the host of Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel.
On the Columbia, where the chinook blast upriver on swells of tide from the mouth of the river up past Washougal and then seek out the 12-16-foot deep travel corridors close to the banks, the hot salmon bite happens in the first hour.
It didn’t matter to the 17 other people on Zimmern’s crew.
Zimmern was following the Lewis & Clark trail with a perspective on the types of foods the explorers might have encountered. He chose September when the fall chinook salmon (also called king salmon) run is in full swing.
We started in the second hour, on a Tuesday in September, after camera operators, directors, drivers, handlers, drone techs, and a bodyguard were breakfasted, caffeine’d up, and constitutionalized.
Josh Cooper, stood, his hand on the tiller, his eyes on the water ahead. We idled away from the Rowena launch (Mayer State Park, west of The Dalles). Ahead of us, 64 other boats were on the fish. Rods bent and nets flashed as we took our place in the throng of watercraft.
Cooper, who makes his home in Vancouver, WA, our captain for the day, is one of the best anglers on the river. But sometimes that’s not enough. The bite was over when we dropped our baits.
With us, on Josh’s 26-foot Motion Marine Fishing Machine were two camera operators and a sound technician. A camera boat trailed in our wake with the director and additional camera operators. A drone operator and his team staged on the Washington side of the river near the mouth of the White Salmon. The bodyguard stayed on the beach.
Zimmern is no stranger to a fishing rod, but he hadn’t fished for Columbia chinook before.
We showed him the baits, hoping he wouldn’t gobble them or try to get us to eat them.
We call this hover-fishing when the fish stack two feet off the bottom and we drift our baits into a bio-mass of salmon, as drag-free as possible.
I looped a cluster of cured salmon roe and a sand shrimp tail on a blood-red Daiichi hook. We drizzled Pro-Cure Tuna on the potpourri in case our prospective salmon had cultivated palates.
To hover-fish, the procedure is to start at the top of holding water and run the boat a bit slower than the top currents, the baits “hovering” off the bottom.
Zimmern’s rod had a Daiwa line-counter. Without digital advantage, I dropped the lead weight to the bottom and then cranked up two turns.
We tried to follow the contour of the river bottom. When it sloped up, we reeled up, when the water deepened, we dropped weights down to touch, then cranked up two turns.
Fish bit. They flared their gills, inhaled to sample the salmon eggs and shrimp then spit the baits.
Josh missed one. Andrew missed two and I missed a fish.
In the east, the sun climbed higher. Our chances diminished. A drone like an angel flew overhead and three hundred pairs of eyes on 65 boats looked to the heavens.
Then it happened! A fish bit and the hook stuck.
Andrew arced the spine of the rod against His Majesty, the king salmon. After a few tense minutes, a seven-pounder thrashed in the net.
I looked at it, pronounced it a female, and guessed Zimmern would try to spoon-feed us salmon eggs. With one in the boat, we motored away, back to the ramp where the crew had assembled a grill and Dutch ovens.
While a director in cowboy boots stalked up and down the beach, cigarette in and out of his mouth, eyes flicking from one element of the scene to another, Zimmern’s knives flashed. When I angled in to check on the ingredients, I saw prime red-fleshed steaks and two skeins of milt. Milt! Our fish was a male.
In a male salmon, the sperm we call milt lies in two foot-long rolls. About an inch in diameter, the texture of fresh liver, it is often discarded. It shouldn’t be.
On a sandbar on the big river that is the lifeline of The West, there is no better way to taste the elemental flavor of the salmon.
Roasted lemons, eggplant, and onions. Rice and a reduction. Zimmern wasted no motion.
Flames licked at the grill. Seasonings are seared into vegetables, salmon strips, and organs. In moments we held salmon bowls while the good smells wafted out to fishermen still angling for their limits of bright chinook.
The best place to eat salmon is on a sandbar in September. We ate the strips of salmon with forks and fingers. We ate the milt and proclaimed it worthy. Milt and eggs. These are the building blocks of the protein that energizes the Columbia River. How does milt taste? It cooks up like a better version of tofu and it adds a certain something to a salmon bowl.
This was Zimmern’s first time fishing for fall Chinook. While we labored for a bite we talked fly-fishing and grouse hunting. And it was a chance for me to get a glimpse into the machine that was a big Travel Channel production. At the heart of it all was a chef who was a risk taker, story-teller, all-showman, and a real sportsman.
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For a copy of the Fishing Central Oregon book, send $29.99 to Gary Lewis Outdoors, PO Box 1364, Bend, OR 97709 To contact Gary Lewis, visit www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com
