Got rid of that San Diego skunk!

I've been on two expensive and skunky charters out of San Diego in the last 3 years. Well we tried one more time...and finally tore it up!

Great weather, good company, excellent charter service and loads of tuna. F'Yeah!



It was a relatively short ride out to Mexican waters. Once the capt saw fish on the sonar he shut it down and we drifted while chumming with cut bait and live sardines. The fish slowly worked their way up from 100-150' until they were breaking the surface all around the boat and we had birds diving. We drifted live sardines with the reels in free spool while applying just enough thumb pressure to let the bait swim. When the line started peeling off we would count to three, engage the spool and hold on. Very powerful fish!

After catching my first yellow fin I celebrated with a Modelo and a tuna heart that was still beating. Fresh! We started boating fish so quickly that there were multiple hook ups and not enough time to put them in the cooler. Someone was yelling fish on and someone else was yelling for the gaff. The back of the boat turned into a crime scene and everyone was covered in spattered blood.



We boated 11 yellow fin and 3 blue fin between 25 - 35 lbs. Fished with my sister Andrea, grad school buddy Jeff (some of you should recognize him) & my uncle.

Culinary Arts of Mongolia

Just got back from another run to Mongolia, while whale is not common we had a LOT of goat parts and marmot. I’m here to tell you marmot is delicious.

The way it is prepared is quite interesting. It starts with a good headshot on a fat marmot using an obscure Russian surplus 4.something mm rifle with a homemade bipod.
Next burn all the hair off the body. From there you remove the head and gut it through the neck hole. Then, with a small knife, you carefully remove all the bones (again through the neck hole). Then mix together all the innards and the bones (with meat on them) and some salt and the stems of a small, plant whose name escapes me, that taste like a wonderful mix of onions and garlic. Next push all this and some smooth baby fist sized rocks back into the neck hole to fill the body cavity and tie the neck hole closed.

Cook slowly for a few hours and the little dude bloats up like a football. The rocks heat up and help to cook it from the inside out. To serve, cut the critter open and take all the goodies out of the cavity and pass the hot greasy rocks to all in attendance. These have a ‘special therapeutic value’; you rub them in your hands and suck the fat off of them. The boneless marmot is then cut up like a loaf of bread and served. Quite tasty!
We stepped out to visit some nomadic herder friends out in the south Gobi and got lucky enough to find them. These folks move around quite a bit following their herds but we know where they were the week before so we headed in that general direction and caught up with them. When you show up with several bottles of vodka it becomes necessary to kill a goat. Interesting way they do this, they look over the herd and choose a goat depending on the importance of the guest. Aint every day that a dude in a straw hat shows up at your ger so they picked the fattest goat in the herd. No guns or clubs involved in the deed, just grab one up by the horn and make a small cut at the sternum and reach inside and find the top of the heart and squeeze off the blood supply till the goat ghost checks out. From there they take em apart about the same way we do, sans the hanging from the tree (aint a lot of trees). They lay it on its back and skin it out and stretch out the skin and stake it to the ground. This becomes the catch pan for all (and I do mean ALL) the bits. The innards are segregated to that which is above and below the diaphragm and placed into large pans for further use.
Following the kill you eat guts, the best part, the first night. This is the meal of honor. With a good fatty goat you obviously get a lot of fat. Some of that was cooked down into a broth with the intestines, spleen, gallbladder, and several other bits. The stomach gets stuffed with lungs, blood, small bits of meat, and those tasty garlic/onion plants and gets cooked in a bowl of the innards broth mentioned previously. The large intestine gets a similar treatment to make a sausage of sorts.
The liver, kidneys, and heart are wrapped in the kidney fat with a dash of salt, skewered with a metal stake and cooked in the ger stove over a fire of coal and dried camel crap.


Then comes the drink…vodka…and a shitload of it. An open bottle is an empty bottle and nobody stops at one bottle. They figure, for planning purposes, at a minimum a bottle per person. This meal had 7 folks in attendance, one was a small child who was switching back and forth between pickles and titties so she didn’t have much, another was our driver who was still on the clock so he just had one glass because that is required and considered an offense to not partake in the first glass. Oh, and you only use one glass as shown in the picture above. You are not required to finish the glass and nobody makes fun of you if you don’t however…you are surely judged positively if you do finish the glass each time it is passed to you. I was viewed in a very positive light.

The meat parts are typically placed into a cardboard box and for some reason unbeknownst to me you drive around with it for several days. I assume this is some sort of curing process but I’m not sure. We would trim off bits and boil them with milk and salt to make a tea that was pretty good.

During a trip to the south Gobi there are three things you can count on.
1. You will get the chance to have some interesting meals with very good people

2. You will get a few flat tires at some point

3. You will get very drunk from time to time
Good times!

not bad for a weekend.

Last weekend started off with a bit of touch rugby. The guys all called the game "touchies" I have a problem with that.

Anyway, over some beers afterwards, we decided that there needed to be a fishing competition that weekend. Three teams for two days. The other two teams have boats that cost in excess of $150k (the St Lazarus that I posted pictures of before and a 28 ft cat) and gear that was probably in excess of $20k. We were in a boat that cost $5k (a 14ft ski boat) and gear that cost about $1k. Saturday we caught a wahoo of 13lb. Then we caught a wahoo of 37lb. Sunday, we caught a wahoo of 22lb. Then we caught a wahoo of 38lb. Then we caught a wahoo of 41lb. During all that time, we lost 6 other fish due to the fact that we had 4 double hook ups and 1 triple hook up (only one person on the rod). Since the boat is so small one person has to drive at all times. We also had 4 additional strikes that didn’t hook up. The other two teams combined caught one kingfish of about 8lb and one dorado of about 4lb. By the way, we caught the wahoo in the picture about 2.5 miles from my back porch.

If you break it down to pounds of fish per gallon of fuel used, we were at about 5. each of the other boats was at about 0.1. We only use 15 gallons of fuel for a whole day of fishing. They use 50 and 100 gallons. Sucks to be them.

Then on sunday night, my buddy gets a call that there is another whale on the beach. The last one that washed up got cut up by the locals, and we had a nice BBQ. (Humpback tastes like a cross between hardhead catfish, and pencil erasers.)

This one (pilot whale) was nice and alive when it washed up, so some Eco-tourists kept pushing it back into the water trying to get it to swim away. About the 3rd time it washed up, some locals came running down with clubs and whipped on it until it died. Then the police called my buddy who came and hooked onto it and drug it to the university. Now, the whole community is in an uproar because they got to eat the last one, but the university is going to bury this one and bleach the bones. Everyone's angry because all the food is going to waste.

Holler if you want to come visit. Maybe we can play some Touchies.

Mendocino County

I've been fixated on freediving since my last trip to Mendocino county in June. The idea of popping abalone and shooting fish in the kelp forest consumed my thoughts for a couple of months. Because of the cold water (50F) I had to invest a small fortune in neoprene and lead weights. I also decided that my old snorkeling gear wasn't going to cut it anymore. Here is a picture of my delicious sea lion suit and pole spear (Abalone iron, gauge and license sold separately).

I drove to a spot in Mendocino County where I knew of a good launch site and protected water. While gearing up on the beach I met a guy who was diving out of an inflatable kayak. After a short conversation about abalone diving I confessed that I had never been before. I expected the guy to bolt but to my surprise he invited me to dive with him. We anchored our kayaks in 20' of water and jumped out. My new dive buddy pulled his limit of 3 abs in only 2 dives. It took me quite a few dives even though the floor was littered with them. There is some technique to prying these snails off a rock. You don't want to give them any warning or else they clamp down so tight that you can't get an iron under them.

I went back out in the afternoon to shoot fish with my pole spear. Visibility was 15 - 20'. I had lots of opportunities but I kept missing them or shooting low. I eviscerated a few fish before my aim improved and I managed to drill a few small fish. I did one more dive on Sunday morning. I chased a large black rockfish around for a while but I could never close the distance on him. While catching my breath on the surface a smaller one suspended directly under me and I speared it through the top of his head. While swimming back to my boat with the fish kabob I realized I was beat from diving, kayaking and hauling my gear across the beach for two days. I packed up camp and headed back to the bay area.

I had to watch videos on how to clean abs before I got to the dirty work. I did ok but I wished that I had trimmed off more of the foot. Cooking these things also takes a little practice.