This article is being displayed with permission from the Food Arts publication, March 2006 issue / PHOTOS BY ROD DEL POZO

Last summer, when Riley Starks, owner of Willows Inn on Lummi Island, Washington, invited me to come up from Bainbridge Island for a day of reef net fishing, I never expected the fishing to eclipse the experience of being at the inn, let alone to mark a mystical milestone in my life. Starks and his wife, Judy Olsen, who also own Nettles Farm, an organic produce and pasta-making company, bought the inn and reopened it in 2000 after most of it had been sold off and the main building had been converted into a private residence.  Ever since I first heard about the inn and its excellent restaurant while I was working as the executive chef at Canlis in Seattle a few years back, the place had been blipping away on my radar screen. So, while I've never been particularly drawn to fishing expeditions, I was drawn to Lummi Island and Willows Inn.

Nine miles long, two miles wide, and occupied by 800 lively souls, Lummi Island looms like a lone humpback whale rising in the waters of Bellingham Bay off the coast of Bellingham, Washington, where I attended college in the early 1980s. After college, for more than a decade, I lived on San Juan Island, just a few miles west of Lummi, on the other side of the same archipelago, but somehow I had never set foot on Lummi itself. Now, several of my chef colleagues were going to be there, and after the fishing expedition we would have the opportunity to cook together. How could I say no?

Johnathan Sundstrom of Seattle's Lark restaurant, the very talented team of general manager Danielle Custer and executive chef Christopher Conville, who run the cafe in the Seattle Art Museum, and Laura Dewell, a Seattle chef and baker who won great acclaim at the defunct Pirosmani would all be arriving at about the same time. Keith Carpenter, the president of Wood Stone Ovens, for whom Dewell had been doing some consulting work, would be there as well. Carpenter, who had been a full-time fisherman as it turns out, had recently purchased one of the few remaining reef net rigs left in Washington. He and Starks had crafted the adventure because they were eager for some local chefs to see the wonder that is reef net fishing and gain some understanding of the salmon that comes from this unique fishery.

I've never been much of a fisherman, but I grew up in the Deep South, on a part of the Florida Gulf Coast known as the Redneck Riviera, so I have spent some time sitting on docks and in boats with a pole and a line.  But fishing for me was more about watching the light play on the water, listening to the weird calls of large birds, and breathing the oxygen saturated air that rolled down out from the green bayous into the Gulf of Mexico.

At 20, when I moved to the Pacific northwest, being on the water was definitely preferable to being in it. Puget Sound temperatures hover in the high 40s, not ideal for swimming or body surfing. Still, I didn't spend much time fishing. Instead, I found my way into a rowboat that allowed me to commute from a small island near Friday Harbor to San Juan, a bigger island where I worked as a cook. I often pulled the rowboat up at the town dock to see what fisherman had for sale that day, but I hardly every went fishing myself.

^ As the fish are hauled in, all fish other than sockeye are released unharmed back into the wild.

It's not that I'm squeamish. I'm perfectly happy to clean and fillet a fish - or just about any other animal. It's just that I never had any particular urge to hunt for my own. So I was quite surprised, on this reef net expedition, to discover a deep and powerful killer instinct. Now that sounds altogether wrong. A killer instinct sounds like a bad thing, and what I tapped into was more like a sacred space where I found joy in life's passing. Pulling salmon out of the sparkling waters of the San Juan Channel onboard a reef net rig, I got in touch, perhaps for the first time in my life, with the hunter side of my hunter-gatherer heritage.

The San Juans consist of some 200 islands - depending on where one draws the line between a large rock and a small island - scattered between Vancouver Island to the west and mainland Washington to the east. Lummi lies at the northeast corner of the island chain, accessible by a five minute ride on a 20-car ferry that runs from an Indian reservation north of Bellingham. The 11 reef net gears here are the only ones left in operation from a fleet that once included 60 or 70 rigs.

Reef net fishing is an ancient art practiced only in a tiny area of the San Juan Islands. The first people who inhabited the area developed the technique shortly after the islands emerged in the wake of the last great ice age. It works like this: two boats are anchored to the rocky bottom of a channel where salmon are swimming against the current on their way from the Pacific Ocean to their freshwater spawning grounds. Shimmering ribbons of kelp dangling from lines drawn between the boats and the seabed form an illusory pair of reefs between the two boats, compelling the fish to swim between them, where, slung like a hammock, lies a net. Towers mounted on the boats allow an observer to look down through the surface glare on top of the water and see when fish are swimming into the net. An observer close to the water would never see the fish, bot from an eagle's-eye view, it's easy to note the glimmering forms as they move toward the trap. When the observer gives the signal, fishermen on deck retrieve the nets. And even though motors reel in the nets, the practice remains essentially unchanged since Neolithic times.

In terms of quantity, reef-netting might constitute the world's least significant method for commercial salmon harvesting, but for three reasons the technique almost undoubtedly provides the highest quality sockeye salmon. This particular population of sockeye is unique in and of itself; second, the fishery is unmatched in terms of sustainability; and third, the fish are handled in a way that ensures they will be in near-perfect condition when they reach the market either fresh or as blast-frozen vacuum-sealed fillets. And some chefs - Sundstrom, Custer, and Christine Keff (Flying Fish and Fandango) in Seattle, and Anthony's Restaurants, 18 diversely named seafood outlets in Washington and Oregon - are among those taking advantage of this indigenous fishery. (Reef net-caught salmon can be ordered from Lummi Island Wild; 360/220-0013 or 360/224-6512; lummiislandwild.com; and from Heritage Foods USA: 212/980-6603; heritagefoodsusa.com.)

Consider the peculiar natural history of this fish. Often regarded as the most desirable of the five species of Pacific salmon (see "A Chef's Field Guide to Salmon," Food Arts, June 2003, page 70) sockeye are smaller and redder-fleshed than king or silver salmon varieties. Unlike other salmon species, sockeye have never been farmed nor have they been successfully raised in hatcheries to be released later into the wild. And while their range extends from the Kuril Islands to the Kamchatka peninsula in Pacific Russia and from the Columbia River north to Alaska on the North American coast, each population of salmon must spawn and die in precisely the same inland rivers where it was born. In an age-old cycle, the remains of one generation of salmon provide nourishment for the next. (Continued at the top of the page)

^ Far above the water line, a spotter has a bird's-eye view of the fish entering the net.

Once the fish are in the net, the catch is released into one of two pens suspended beneath the boat and accessible through a trap door-like arrangement. each fish is lifted from the water by hand and its gills are pulled out so that, when it is released into the second net, it will bleed into the current that flows rapidly beneath the anchored boats. Once they are bled, the fish are moved to a container full of iced seawater and delivered to a processor within 24 hours. The result is a fish of extremely clean flavor and perfect texture.

How, one may ask, are the fish lifted from the water by hand? I wondered that even as I watched it happening over and over in the course of a few hours onboard one of the reef net boats. I was invited to try and catch the fish, but though I tried and tried to catch them, the fish slipped away before I could grab them. Finally, kneeling beside the holding pen, soaked to the skin, I asked the teenage fisherman who was blithely lifting the fish out of the water how he accomplished it. And this is where the hunter's instinct came into play.

"Just watch," he said.

With a calm deliberation that evoked Zen detachment, he focused on the fish, moving his hand steadily and fairly swiftly over its back before lifting it out of the water; with the other hand, he plucked the gills from the fish, and as it began to bleed, he lowered it into the adjacent net where it would swim until it lost most of its blood. The fish seemed most cooperative.

Exhaling through my nose, calmly focusing on one of the fish, I followed the young man's moves as precisely as I could. As I reached for it a fish seemed to press itself, almost willingly, up into my right hand. Without pausing to exult, I lifted it from the water and used the thumb and middle finger on my left hand to gently pull out its gills. It gave a quiet shudder, like a low electric current, as it surrendered its life into my hands, but it did not resist. Then I moved the fish into the adjacent pen and released it to bleed into the current.

"That's it," said my young Zen master. "You got it."

And, without missing a beat, I immediately reached into the pen and pulled out another fish. Sundstrom knelt beside me and quickly mastered the technique too. Before long, the other chefs had the knack as well, and all of us sensed that something wonderful had transpired.

Back at the inn, which was closed for the nigh, we fired up the Wood Stone oven and went to work. Starks and Olsen offered us access to their pantry and to a tank filled with a cache of live spot prawns. I determined at once to put together spot prawn bisque using fresh  tomatoes, shallots, thyme, and the heads of the prawns for the base; each serving would be garnished with a substantial quenelle made from the lobster-like tails. As I separated their heads from their tails, I felt the spot prawns shudder and realized that here again was the sensation I had felt when I pulled the gills from the salmon, the eerie but intensely positive charge of life passing out of one form and into another. I was reminded of a line in the celebrated and long out-of-print cookbook, Gala, by Fernand Point and Salvador Dali regarding the specter of death that lends resonance to all the best cooking. Once that line disturbed me; now it made sense.

Sundstrom went to work on a carpaccio of summer squash - paper-thin slices of zucchini topped with a drizzle of white truffle oil and some aged Gouda from nearby Skagit Valley. The capable team of Custer and Conville bearded live mussels and browned sausages for a dish that also included a curry-like blend of spices; the sausages were made from pigs fattened on whey from the very milk that went into the cheese on top of Sundstrom's vegetable carpaccio.

As for the sockeye, it was filleted and spread over the oven floor under a veil of olive oil and garlic. It was to be garnished with broccoli raab, similarly dressed, and flash-roasted in the same oven. As we prepared to move toward the dining room, where Starks and Olsen had set a magnificent table with a view of the madrona colored sunset, we clinked our glasses of fino Sherry and contemplated a basket of sweet-tart yellow plums, all that was left of the fresh produce.

"All we need is dessert," said Custer. "Why don't you do that Willie's Crisp thing that you do? And I'll whip some cream."

So as soon as the salmon came out of the oven, I replaced it with a shallow dish of pitted yellow plums laid in a single layer under and impromptu topping of buttered flour, egg, and sugar, which baked into crisp, delicate crust. Custer passed a bowl of whipped cream spiked with vanilla and Grand Marnier. With no prior planning, we had produced one of the grandest meals I have ever cooked or eaten. And each of us came away with not only a greater appreciation of the best sockeye salmon any of us will ever hope to eat but also a deeper appreciation for life itself.