table talk / By Bob Doran

Golden fish — Trinidad Fish Festival turns 50

(June 7, 2007)  The town may be stretching things just a little bit by calling its big event Sunday “Trinidad’s 50th Annual Fish Festival,” but we’ll forgive it. It was 1957, 50 years ago, when the little port town began celebrating its ties with the fishing and seafood business with an annual event, but it was not called the Fish Festival — crab was the main dish for the first 15 years or so.

“In the beginning it was George Collins who put the crab feed together,” recalled Jack Faulkner, the town’s former postmaster and a Fish Fest veteran. “They cooked it over fires down on the beach; it was just a small thing. It started growing until at the end they were doing two tons of fish and crab. Then crab got hard to get with all the storms we had. We did it the second weekend in April and there was a whole series of bad storms in a row. Fact is, Bob Hallmark’s boat turned over — it was too heavy — he was bringing in crab for us. That was back in the early ‘70s. It got to where we had to import crab and that was too expensive, so we went to just a fish fry with barbecued salmon and deep fat fried white fish.”

Trinidad Fish Festival grill crew volunteers. Photo courtesy of Trinidad Chamber of Commerce

GALLERY >

Faulk, 72 and retired, has been involved since the crab feed days. He’s had the same volunteer job at the Fish Festival since the transition. “I’m on what we call ‘the filleting committee,’” he explained. “I didn’t know anything about cutting fish or anything, but I was smart. I got Bill Snell — his father has the Sea Around Us [a gift shop in town] — I asked if he’d help me.”

Bill’s name rang bells for me. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s when I was chef at the Silver Lining in McKinleyville, Bill’s sister, Lore Snell, was one of our waitresses. (Nowadays Lore runs Trinidad Trading Post.) Bill was working for some smokehouse up in Trinidad and would deliver smoked fish we used in various dishes. He’d also bring in whole salmon on occasion, and if he had time, I’d get him to cut up the fish. I tried to imitate his technique — he was a surgeon with a filleting knife, able to separate every ounce of flesh from the bones; I was always a butcher in comparison.

Bill still volunteers at the Fish Festival, working with John Calkins cutting the salmon into steaks while Jack deals with the white fish fillets, portioning them with a scale he sets up every year and cutting out the occasional bones.

“Bill and John have been with me forever and a day,” noted Jack, praising their skill at fish cutting and portion control. “They back the salmon,” he added, “otherwise the skin sticks to the grill and we have a helluva time getting it off without tearing it up.”

That’s another area where Bill’s expertise comes into play. I tried to learn his method for “backing salmon,” essentially skinning the whole fish with a deft pull in just the right place, but it’s a fine art — I never got the hang of it.

The skinless salmon is dipped in a special marinade (we’ll get to that in a minute) and cooked to perfection on a collection of barbecue grills crafted from 50-gallon drums.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE