Two Tiny Retailers serve Fish
If you are in the market for fish lately, there are two new places that you can go. You had best decide what kind of fish you are after, however, before you start out. Longfin Seafoods in Chinook, Washington, will sell you crab and fish fresh from local fishermen. North Coast Aquarium Maintenance in Seaside sells octopus and clams, but strictly for enjoyment, not for consumption.
Longfin Seafoods
In these days of declining fisheries, people in the fishing industry can use all the friends they can get. They have one in Kathy Stocking.
Kathy is originally from Morrow Bay, California, and she has been in the seafood business for 22 years. She had been a specialty fish cutter, a fish packer and a plant manager. "Then the industry died out even quicker than it had here," she said and one day, when the industry where she was working shrank out from under her, she jumped in her camper and took off for parts unknown. "If you can wait tables, you can get a job anywhere," she said. She landed in the Pacific Northwest two years ago and took a job as a horse wrangler, giving beach rides in Long Beach, Washington.
She liked her neighbor, Larry Malchow, right off the bat and left the horse business to go fishing with him last year. Now her partner in the fish store, Larry comes from a third-generation Chinook family and is a commercial fisherman. His boat, a 40-foot troller that was once the largest at the Port of Chinook, is the Doreen.
Larry trolls salmon and tuna in season and crabs in the winter. He has been in the business for 30 years and hand-picks the crab for Longfin Seafoods, the market that Kathy and Larry opened in Chinook on February 1, 1999. The goal of the store is to buy as much fresh fish from local fishermen as possible.
The market is located in a small retail building formerly occupied by a survey company. The owners of the building, Don and Joyce Short, have worked very hard to help convert the space for the needs of the market. Floors were replaced, six sinks were installed and Kathy found the freezers and showcase counters.
They offer halibut and crab, fresh rockfish and tuna in season, among other items. A local oyster and clam farmer brings in fresh product almost daily. "We will have troll-caught Salmon coming to the public in April for about $2 to $2.25 per pound," said Kathy. While the first objective is to be an outlet for local fishermen, she will even travel to Newport, if necessary, to get the freshest fish. If fresh local fish is not available, she will also purchase Atlantic Salmon, so customers can always have a choice.
Kathy sets her pricing by "a little bit of instinct, a little bit of knowing what the market is doing and a whole lot by what I have to pay for it."
Longfin Seafoods
Principals: Kathy Stocking and Larry Malchow
Address: 762 State Route 101
P. O. Box 75 Chinook, WA 98614
Telephone: 360/777-8169
Toll Free: 877-LONGFIN
Hours: 10a - 6p, seven days a week
North Coast Aquarium Maintenance
Craig Andes was born in Tennessee, but only lived there two months. He spent the majority of his childhood in Colorado. By the time he was in 7th grade, his family took off again, driving up the entire west coast, looking for a place to relocate. They settled for a while in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where his parents had a business called Oregon Reflections. One year later they sold that business and moved to the Valley. During his junior year in high school, they settled once again, this time in Silverton, Oregon. Craig began coming back to the beach just about that time, securing summer jobs. Two years ago, he moved here permanently on his own.
His first entrepreneurial venture was to set up an espresso stand in 1996 at Don Holt's former gas station location which is now the home of Bruce Smith Automobiles. Five months ago he began venture number two, this time building on a lifelong hobby: saltwater fish. Craig had goldfish as a youngster and bought his first saltwater aquarium from a shop in Astoria at age 14. In October, 1998, he opened North Coast Aquarium Maintenance in what used to be the location for North Coast Interactive Media. He has all 299 square feet of that space crammed with more than 675 gallons of filtrated salt water.
He has over fifty saltwater creatures in stock at any given time and can sell you exotic corals for $20 to $60, damsel fish for $4 - $5, or even a baby giant clam that wholesales for almost $60. Other residents include an octopus (not for sale, but he can get you one of your own, for $35 to $150), moray eels, and a mini bandit pipefish, for example. He has been adding fish and equipment to his inventory on hand at a rate of about $100 per week. He has used equipment available, or can order just about any equipment you need from his wholesalers.
Craig will help you get set up, specifying the basics needed like size of tank, wet/dry filters, protein skimmers, heaters and crushed coral substrate, just to name a few.
He will also maintain your tank for you, for a fee of $2.50 per gallon per month, and recommends tanks no smaller than 75 gallons for an office environment. The initial setup is fairly spendy, however, and he recommends a 200 gallon tank for most commercial applications. Tanks that size may retail for $1,500. "The bigger the tank, however, the more balanced it is, and the easier it is to maintain," said Craig. He will sell you the equipment, or rent it, including the fish or "live rocks" inside. Tanks with live rocks, versus plastic plants and structures often seen in aquariums, make the tank a healthier place for the fish, and he recommends that highly. He also recommends an actinic lighting system, the lights that look like black lights, because that type of lighting helps keep algae to a minimum and shows off the color of the exotic fish better than natural or other types of light. For those liking high tech gadgetry, he has all sorts of equipment for checking salinity, temperature, etc. that, according to Craig, cannot be found anywhere else on the coast.
Additional services include the sales of reverse osmosis water for your saltwater tank, water systems for your own installation, advice on what to do if the environment within your tanks "crashes," and treatment of sick fish. "The worst thing to do if a fish is stressed is to move it," he said. LCB
North Coast Aquarium Maintenance
Principal: Craig Andes
Address: 1928 South Holladay Drive
Seaside, Oregon 97138
Telephone: 503/738-0347
e-mail: bigfish@west-connect.com
Hours: noon - 6p, Wed. - Sunday
or by appointment
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