Death Of The Giant Salmon

They're history now. The June Hogs. Giant salmon evolved for a journey one thousand miles upstream.

Gone, but not forgotten.



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a reply to: Kester
Damn Im jealous, those must have made for some awesome fillets that fed entire parties. But from what I have read, younger meat has better flavor anyways. It takes awhile for anything to grow large enough to reach maximum size. I think black grouper likely tastes better than Goliath grouper as an example.

I was up in Juneau in seventy four. We were watching the salmon go up stream in around September that year. They were big fish. A salmon about the size of the one in the picture took the whole tail off of a big brown trout in the river. The brown trout must have been three feet long and maybe twenty pounds, it looked funny trying to quickly wiggle away without a tail. I sure am glad I am not a fish living in the wild or a goldfish in a Piranha tank.

Are Salmon an annual migration species, ie did they get that huge in one year? Some food supply in the ocean has to have diminished since then.

There were some large ones that ran up the American river. I caught 4 with my hands at Nimbus dam when they blew the horns and restricted the flow from the gates. Fishermen were running everywhere. I got the four out of small puddles, threw them in the trunk and got the hell out of there before any wardens arrived. Not quite as large as the one pictured, but, they were pretty damn big

originally posted by: pavil
Are Salmon an annual migration species, ie did they get that huge in one year? Some food supply in the ocean has to have diminished since then.

They run up the San Joaquin/ Sacramento river here from the ocean. They come in from the Pacific, under the Golden Gate

a reply to: Kester

... And so like Daenerys Targaryen's family's dragon's, they got smaller and smaller until they were the size of cats.

Natural abundance has its limits, especially when you dam the path to the breeding grounds-- as was the case with the giant Chinook salmon of the Pacific northwest. Seeing their enormous silvery forms leaping upriver is a miraculous sight in some of this archival footage, but a fish can’t leap over a 100-foot dam. The fish known as “june hogs” are no more.

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a reply to: pavil

It's a two year cycle, I think...

They don't hatch, then go to the ocean, then come back in one year... I could be misremembering the time span, though...it's been a long ass time since I worked the fishing industry--better part of twenty years now.

ETA: Actually I was mistaken...I know, shocking, right?

It's usually a 3-4 year cycle, sometimes longer...

I can remember being a kid of about 7 or 8 and walking home from school in Hereford, pausing on the old bridge to watch the salmon running up the Wye. They would leap clear out of the water and were huge, there were regular pictures in the Hereford Times of people who landed 20, 30 and 40 pounders on a rod and line. Not seen anything like it in years now (This was the 1970s)
Must be all the netting in the Severn Estuary and out at sea I guess,

Still have quite a few in the Great Lakes.

a reply to: seagull

It looks like this is about the Kings.

The King Salmon, also known as the Chinook Salmon, is one of the most common and most popular fish in the Pacific...

can be found up and down the Pacific coast, all the way from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, in the north, to Santa Barbara, California...

range from 20 to 50 pounds in weight, and are three to four feet long. Some kings are smaller (10 to 15 pounds at their smallest) and some can get absolutely gigantic, pushing 100 pounds! The world record for largest king salmon ever caught is 126 pounds...

On average, King salmon spend three to four years in the ocean (though sometimes it’s as little as one or as much as eight)...

Bout 25 years ago I was a Fishmonger and we on a few occasions got wild Scottish salmon just a little smaller than the one in the pic.
A pleasure to fillet.
I have been watching videos recently cutting up various fish.
I once did a Bluefin Tuna as big as me.



Pity we have killed so many fish off, even worse is the fact that EU fishing laws are bloody stupid. A massive waste.

a reply to: SprocketUK

We get plenty of trout in the beck down my road and the river calder has had salmon returning near Dewsbury.
I think our waterways are getting better.

a reply to: Blaine91555

Yep. I mis-remembered.

I've seen some monstrous Kings in my day. Largest was around 100 lbs dressed. Big ol' grand-daddy King salmon. Thing was as long as I was tall... He was so big we couldn't fit him into the boxes we used to ship...we had to, darn it, steak him out and eat him for dinner.

For those interested, the largest King caught by any tackle was 97 plus pounds, on the Kenai back in '85.

I think the problem is farmed salmon. It was just exploding when I was a fishmonger but even then they were sometimes deformed, the colour was off (sometimes pure white flesh) and they had sores on them, I can not eat any farmed fish.
Now in the UK the lice the farmed salmon have have spreaded to our native wild salmon killing them off .

a reply to: seagull

Right! I believe the picture of it is on the cover of a fishing guide book!

a reply to: seagull

Good eats!!!

Growing up I had an uncle who would go to Alaska once a year and always gave us a large box of salmon steaks. Memories of him and his hunting, fishing and mining exploits in Alaska in the 60's had a lot to do with me moving to Alaska.

a reply to: testingtesting

I don't think that's a problem here on the Pacific coast...yet.

Farmed fish is never as good as wild caught.

Here, it's the hydroelectric dams and the destruction of spawning areas by development. In combination with each other.

originally posted by: testingtesting
a reply to: SprocketUK

We get plenty of trout in the beck down my road and the river calder has had salmon returning near Dewsbury.
I think our waterways are getting better.

I think they are, I fished a River up in Scotland that used to run 20lb Salmon, 20 years ago we got nothing but sea trout, 15 years ago we started getting salmon, 10 years ago we were getting Salmon up to 10lb, I havnt been back since but read a report on it's improvement by the John Muir Trust.

Whilst I love fishing, I don't like unregulated commercial fishermen, they claim that it's their livelihood so why would they destroy it? Well guess what, you did, I have dived the grounds where they ran chains over the bottom to get everything into their nets daily at all times of year until there is nothing left.

Farmers look after their livestock, they feed it, they stop disease, th y grow it, apart from fish farms, commercial fishermen are sea rapists taking and taking.

originally posted by: Kester
They're history now. The June Hogs. Giant salmon evolved for a journey one thousand miles upstream.

Gone, but not forgotten.

vimeo.com...

usfwspacific.tumblr.com...

usfwspacific.tumblr.com...

That's a beaut isn't it! That thing is gigantic, you don't see that anymore.