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August 2, 2011

This week marks the beginning of August and new quotas for certain species of fish.

We have a great supply of hook-and-line Massachusetts Wild Striped Bass from Cape Cod ranging from 10-25 pounds and above. This is truly a sushi quality fish at prices that are incredibly cheap. Call for the price because it will surprise you how inexpensive these fish are right now. They are less expensive than Grouper and Snapper.

Speaking of Snapper, we blew through a lot of the Snapper last week that was on special. We have a new shipment that came in over the weekend. It's great quality, prices are still down and hopefully they will stay down for the rest of the week. Grouper and Snapper are reasonably priced and good items to look at for a menu choice mainly because they haven’t changed much week to week.

We are starting to get some new sources on Amberjack from the East Coast as well as a couple of hundred pounds of Cobia and small quantities of various local Carolina day boat fish. Please check every day to see what is coming in.


Swordfish, again this week, is a fish to focus on. We have good landings and excellent quality shipments arriving almost daily. In addition, we were able to get 2 Harpoon Swordfish from Nova Scotia that will be landing at our dock this morning.


We also received some incredible quality Bluefin Tuna. The limits on Bluefin had been curtailed for the North Atlantic run for the last four or five years and they are beginning to show a rebound in the resource. The quality is excellent. This is a highly controlled fishery. What we are seeing right now is some excellent fish; great color, some fat but super-fresh fish that arrived at our door this morning from the weekend catch.

On the Salmon front, we are getting Salmon from Scotland at good prices as well as from both Eastern and Western Canada. We are trying to boycott Chilean Salmon until those prices get in line with reality.

Sockeyes are slowing down in Cook Inlet. We think the season probably has two to three more weeks to go. Hopefully we will get some good test reports for Sockeyes out of Johnstone Straits and the Fraser River in Canada. If we have good reports of Sockeye returns in the Fraser River we may have a late Sockeye season bonanza similar to last year and Sockeyes may continue beyond August. We’ll know what the test fisheries from those areas show by the end of the week.

The forecast now is if for an excellent run of Coho Salmon for the late summer and early fall out of Alaska. Hopefully the prices will be reasonable. On another front, we’re getting almost daily shipments of Kotzebue Ketas.

Last week Western Canada landed a great supply of Troll Kings that are now coming into our building. We decided to only buy 11-pound and larger fish and will have both whites and reds available. These should be hitting our docks some time this afternoon and prices are very, very good. The quality is sure to be superb since these are hook-and-line fish.

Shellfish in August is always an issue. We are doing our best to get a good variety of Shellfish from all over the West Coast, as well as the East Coast. There is some coming out of the South, although quality is spotty and prices are creeping up on oysters in the shell.

Because the meats of the southern Oysters are thin and in-spawn we are seeing the price of gallons go up as the yield from the Sack Oysters goes down. Now is a good time to look at Pacific Northwest half gallons and we will be sending out pre-orders for next week at the end of business on Thursday. In addition, we are seeing new resources of in-shell oysters coming out the Chesapeake. The waters there are much colder than water in the Gulf South. We are now finding some reasonably priced shell stock coming out of there. We will probably be introducing them over the next couple of weeks and definitely at our Food Show come September.

The big news this week is that certain areas of the North Atlantic were opened for Scallop fishing for the first time in three years. We expect to see the price of U/10 scallops, and possibly U/12, fall. Because the scallops in this area are rumored to be huge, some people are predicting that 10/20’s and 20/30’s may be higher than the larger Scallops in the coming weeks. Make plans accordingly.

Lobsters are beginning to become more plentiful. The big shed is happening now but we are still dubious about bringing in many new shells at this point. To avoid massive losses with new shells we are still waiting for the end of the week until we see the shell quality firm up somewhat.

We are starting to see a lot of Ultra Fresh day boat Shrimp come in from all over the East Coast from Georgia to the Carolinas. We are now getting Shrimp that are 16/20’s all the way to 41/50’s in size. Check with your salesperson for the availability each day.

Crab Meat is still an incredible bargain. We don’t remember prices ever being this low at this time of year and there are rumors that the price is going to drop even more. It is incredible that people are still buying pasteurized Crab Meat when they could be buying Fresh, Locally Produced Crab Meat for much less money. We understand the convenience factor but the taste of fresh Crab Meat just can’t be beat, especially as compared to pasteurized Crab Meat.