Chum, Choho, Chinook

For those of you who are not anglers or meat-eaters, chum, choho and chinook are all types of salmon found in *drum roll please,* Alaska!

One of the characters in my book is a fisherman out of Nome. I got to thinking about him this past weekend, and wondered how large of an operation he’d need to be running to provide for his family. Doing this forced me to do more math than I’ve needed since teaching GED class, but whatever it takes to write an accurate story!

The average pacific salmon weighs about 20 pounds (Chinook can be up to 30 pounds, but choho and chum are about 18 pounds). The edible part of the fish is about 75% of it’s weight, so for each 20 pound salmon there’s 15 pounds of fillet. That equals about 240 oz of fillet per fish.

The typical serving of fish is somewhere between 3 and 6 ounces, depending on which sources you look at. I ran with that number at first, but realized our serving size of fish wouldn’t necessarily be accurate for an Alaskan’s, because they don’t have has many caloric options readily available for most of the year. They’d depend on substance they could get for free rather than expensive imported foods when possible. With that in mind I doubled the serving size to 12 ounces. A 15 lb salmon would provide twenty 12 ounce portions.

Using a standard 4 person family, that means 5 family meals per salmon. Based on that, how many salmon would need to be caught in the brief time they’re running to not only feed the fisherman’s family for a year, but also earn him some cash?

I figure they would depend on salmon for about 7 months of the year (210 days, or 30 weeks). If a family of four at salmon 5 times a week, they’d need 600 servings. Divide the number of servings needed (600) by the number of servings in a single salmon (5) and you’ll get 120. A family of 4 would need 120 salmon to feed them for a year.

My characters would more than that since they running a boarding house/hotel. They also put up sled dogs when mushers visit, and sled dogs traditionally were fed salmon. I have not found a source on the internet that tells me how much salmon a dog would eat (but I assume it’s as much as you give them!) From watching Life Below Zero, they seem to give each dog half a salmon each, but I have no way of knowing how much that portion weighs or how often.

Thinking about sled dogs, I wondered if a musher would be able to catch enough fish to feed their team easily. Without boats, they could catch them by net, and they might get 20 per day. I’m not convinced they’d catch enough on their own to feed all their dogs for the winter that way. I’ve found nothing on it, but wonder if mushers wouldn’t team up with a fisherman, exchanging work on the boat/river for a percentage of their catch?

But back on topic to my character, beyond providing food for the family, he’d also want to sell some too. I found a nifty chart that says the price of canned salmon per pound in 1920 was 38 cents, or $5.70 per 15 lb. salmon (thank you government consumer reports!). I’m sure the cannery took a hefty percentage of that, so let’s say the fisherman would sell them to the cannery (or other local business) for 20 cents per pound. That’d be $3.00 profit for every salmon caught beyond the approx. 120 needed for his family. Using the conservative 20 salmon per day, that’d be $60 of profit per day, or $420/week.

Keeping in mind his wife runs a boarding house that would bring in $1,200 per year, that there are other things he’d be fishing for when the salmon weren’t running, that he does some carpentry in the winter, and that a almost all of their meat was free… they’d be doing fairly well for themselves considering the average household income in 1920 was $3,269.40.

What a rabbit hole! But it gives me shape to my character’s lives, so well worth it.