Want anything from Alaska? Local fisherman Zac Culbertson is going anyway.
Culbertson runs a small family farm just outside Charlottesville. And he also runs Cold Country Salmon, a direct-delivery and farmers’ market-based retail seafood operation. For his wares—mostly salmon, but also halibut and sablefish—Culbertson heads to Alaska once a year and fishes the waters of Elfin Cove like a barracuda after a sparkly bracelet.
Salmon season lasts only a short time, so Culbertson typically travels to southeast Alaska in June. He makes his annual catch in less than two calendar months, torridly fishing for days on end over that single, frenzied period.
Take king salmon. Culbertson landed about 11,000 pounds of the stuff last year in only a handful of days. Indeed, the king salmon catch sometimes runs only a single day. As for coho salmon, which Culbertson calls his “bread and butter,” 9,000 pounds of catch weight found its way into Cold Country Salmon’s live wells last year. And a good amount of that then went to C’ville customers.
“The Charlottesville market is one of my top markets,” Culbertson says. “I think with the pandemic…there was a lot more interest in nailing down a food pipeline. People felt like the supermarkets were running out of everything, and they wanted a local source for things.”
Even if that local source has to make a 3,600-mile run to grab the goods.