one of my favorite things about working in a cannery was learning the details of the processing portion of the fishing industry. i've said it before and i'll say it again, we're so detatched about where our food comes from, and i was unhealthily fascinated with watching everything.
to begin with, the fish came to us on tenders.
here you can see a tender that is at the dock, relieving it's holds of fish. the big silver machine is a giant vacuum that sucks them up. (you can see the fish in brine in the middle there.) it's pretty fun watching the fish get sucked up, you can see them in the tubes going off to the bins.
there are seven bins, the first six hold 90,000 pounds of salmon, the last one 70,000. that's a lot of fish when they are all full. (that's a lot of fish even if they aren't all full.)
from there, the fish go on a conveyer belt to get butchered, and in the cannery sliced, patched (making sure the cans weigh the right amount and look pretty) lidded, and they go to retort where they are cooked. from there, they go to the warehouse, and then off to city dock to be shipped.
in the freezer, we also had a butcher line. first, they go through the chink (so-called because it was once advertised as being able to "replace a hundred chinamen") where there heads are removed, then the tails.
that part in the middle is the part that cuts the heads off. the blade was this huge thing that every night dave, the machinist, would take off and sharpen by hand. it was a scary looking bit, but it was kind of fun to watch it go around and see the heads come off. the bit on the far left is where the tails and fins would get cut off. i never fully understood the mechanics behind it, but that's what it did. (i think it's also the thing that gave us the most trouble; we spent a lot of time waiting around for it to get fixed.)
then the fish went into the ryan to get eviscerated!
these things sliced the belly open and sent all the insides somewhere else to be sorted. the roe (eggs) is worth more than the fish itself. on the upper left, you can see the slime line. that's where the final cleaning was done, to make sure that there wasn't anything undesirable left inside.
(the slime line)
and then they came to me.
this is what i stared at every day for about a month. i counted the scoops of ice that went in, weighed the pre-fish tote weight and the final weight, and figured out what the net was. i printed out labels and recorded everything. i was the queen of the scale. i was also lucky to get a dry job.
and that's basically it! a tote like this, made out of cardboard, would get flown to one of two locations. since these are tail off, they were probably going to kenai where they filleted them. tail on would be a cannery in canada. we also butchered salmon for our own fillet line, but for that we used blue plastic totes. and it didn't have to be as precise since no planes depended on me being underneath a certain weight.
and so that is a very basic version of what salmon go through in a cannery. or at least, the freezer portion of it!
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