6:47pm Kenai, AK
I just got a personal tour of the plant while it was in action. I took in so much information i don't know if i can remember it all. Bobbie started with me at the hopper and i got to watch them cut the heads off the fishes. Then they put the open neck over a rotating blade which frees up the guts and allows them to be pulled out easier. Next the fish gets its insides pulled out. In this are the organs and intestines and a sleeve containing the roe. The guts and sleeve go down to a different conveyor belt where a group of girls sort the sleeves from the guts. The guts or gurry go down a chute and get ground up, then they travel down the 'gurry line' out to the water where the seagulls eat them. The fish are then scraped, rinsed, and graded by weight. 1, 2, or 3 i don't remember which is the biggest. Then depending on their size they get packaged or frozen or cut up for fillets. Bigger fish get shipped fresh to the lower 48 then medium and smaller fish can either get frozen and sent out later or cut up for fillets - they do this at the Kasilof plant.
Then Bobbie took me to the roe room. The roe stay in their sleeves and get agitated in a brine solution. Actually i am not even going to try and explain this. Roe are so specific and they are handled and packaged so specially that i can't remember all of the details. I know that they are graded by size and color - and they are so neat looking in their sleeves. There are 2 ways of processing roe and of course they are japanese words and i just can't remember them now but one way keeps them in their sleeve and the other way separates out the eggs and they get used for sushi.
Next we went to case up. They take the fish that have just come off the slime line and put them in a different hopper and sort them even further. They pack them fresh into plastic lined boxes slap a label on them that says what river they are from, if they are deheaded and gutted, what grade they are and what kind of salmon they are. Then they get shipped to the lower 48 to get sold and eaten. Some of the more undesirable salmon get saved and then cut up and scraped off the bone for salmon patties.
Then we walked out onto the dock where the crew was off loading a tender. There is this giant hose vacuum that gets lowered by a crane (it supports the weight of the hose so that it doesn't get sucked to the bottom) into the hull where it sucks the fish out and deposits them in the hopper to get sorted by type. Then they go into totes and get fork lifted into processing. They don't like to process different types of salmon at the same time because the roe get processed differently. When the level of fish gets low enough they pull the hose out and pitch the rest of the fish out manually. (or sling them as i like to think)
It was awesome. There is so much to know and do. It really is incredible. And it was impressive to see the whole thing in action. I have such a better idea and can visualize it all now. I am going to try and go back another time and take pictures. Just so that you can see too.