Wow, what a week. I've just returned from a full seven days of alien-hunting on the road in New England. Driving solo from Charlottesville, Virginia, I made it to New Haven, Connecticut just barely in time to keep a dinner appointment at Miya's Sushi.Visiting Miya's was important because the primary point of this trip was to find and eat invasive European green crabs (also known as shore crabs, green crabs, and various other local names). Bun Lai, the owner of Miya's, decided to start putting some invasive species on the menu and I had to see how this turned out.
Bun was in San Francisco when I was coming to town, but he was good enough to put me in touch with his supplier of green crabs, Bren Smith. Bren has been everything from an attorney to a long-line fisherman on the Bering Sea. Today he is a sustainable oysterman on Long Island Sound. Within a few hours Bren and a few friends convinced me that the finest and most ecologically sustainable food on the entire planet is oysters. We ate all sorts of interesting sushi, capped by rolls served on a flat rock with whole, seasoned green crabs posed on top.
The simplest thing is to crunch them down whole, shell and all. I was dubious at first but the shells are so thin that they aren't a problem. They really tasted very good. I could see these being sold by the bag and eaten like potato chips.
The next morning, on Bren's advice, I stopped at a state park on Long Island to walk along the beach and pick up crabs in the tide pools. In spite of all of the traps and gadgets that I bought to try out, flipping over rocks in tide pools and picking the crabs up seems to be the easiest way of getting them. Their pincers are too small to hurt, let alone do any damage.
I headed straight from the Sound to the Cabela's store in Hartford, where I bought a new salt-water fishing rig. Based on the excellent advice I got from some readers of this blog, I bought a two-piece Uglystik and a Shimano reel.
Onward to Wilmington, Massachusetts where I knocked on my cousin Patrick's front door and within minutes we were both back in my car headed to his best spot for rainbow trout. We slid down the embankment and got our hooks in the water just about twenty minutes before dark. I cast my line with a faux salmon egg into the smooth water just above a drop, let it drift almost over the edge and then reeled it back in slowly. Ten minutes later we had each caught a nice 14 incher and we brought them home to Patrick's to clean.
My cousin is unable to spend more than an hour at a time not fishing. As soon as the trout were cleaned and refrigerated we were right back in the car to drive over to Silver Lake to fish in the dark with Patrick's friend Justin for catfish and American eels. They pulled up some very creditable bullheads with bait consisting of hotdogs soaked in olive oil and garlic powder. That was the best smelling bait I have ever fished with. We also bagged a few eels, which make for excellent eating.
By the way, rainbow trout, bullheads and eels are all native species. I was fishing for them only for sake of catching and eating them and those species will not appear in my next book, 'Eating Aliens.'
The next afternoon we all drove to Plum Island, MA in Newburyport. We fished late into the cold, rainy night from the beach for striped bass. I searched masses of seaweed for green crabs but only found natives.
We managed to wake up early enough the following day to hit a local river for invasive carp. And boy, did we ever find them. Great monsters of Asian grass carp and a smaller mirror carp with the strangest arrangement of scales I've ever seen. We kept the largest one, which I fileted and brought home with me on ice.
Instead of driving straight home, I decided to make the three hour drive to say hello to my editor at Storey Publishing in North Adams, MA. It was worth the drive even just for the ten wonderful minutes during which I was invited to peruse Storey's library and walk out with whatever books I wanted. Given the bent of their catalog and the range of my personal interests, it was difficult to restrain myself from outrageous greed.
Over lunch, my editor suggested that I stop by New York City on my way home. The Book Expo of America was (and still is) going on and Storey sent a delegation and a large booth. I stayed the night in a cottage on a lake near North Adams, fishing unsuccessfully for bass in an old Gumman rowboat. The next morning I drove to NYC.
The Book Expo was awesome. People were handing me free books everywhere I went. I finally had to stop accepting them, knowing that I'd have to haul all of them back with me through the subway to get to my car, parked on the upper west side.
After another day of driving I finally got home yesterday just ahead of dusk. I'm completely exhausted, but need to immediately start preparing for the expedition to Louisiana with Grant Stoddard of Men's Health magazine. Grant arrives on a train Sunday afternoon and the next morning we're starting the two-day drive to Shreveport for nutria. Then down to New Orleans for a few days to see about some feral chickens in the 9th Ward and maybe over to Mobile, Alabama for a day to visit a spear-hunting museum.
[Photo copyright 2011, Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. The photo depicts a mirror carp caught by my cousin, Patrick McNamara]
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