When Jam Today first came out, one of the segments that caught a number of eyes was the one about Sally Bogardus, who, with her husband Daryl, is the hard-working force behind Pisces Tuna. I’d met Sally, as I wrote, when I was shopping at my local co-op, and she was giving out samples of what I had already come to think of as the World’s Best Canned Tuna.
Imagine. Local canned tuna. From an actual person. From an actual person like Sally.
So I wrote about the tuna—which is still, by the way, a staple in our household, the present count in the pantry being a conservative five cans—and thought idly about the Pisces story from time to time, when one day the phone rang. And it was Sally. She’d tracked me down through my landline listing in the local phone book (another charmingly retro detail to this story, isn’t it?). And she wanted me to know that she’d been getting orders from people who read the book.
I mentioned that I’d spotted her tuna being sold at the beach motel my dear husband and I frequent, and we gossiped about her friends who own it. I love this kind of thing. Food and community. Especially good food and community.
When I was updating this book, it occurred to me I should give her a call and see if anything had changed. Email address yet? Website? Anything like that?
Almost comfortingly, it turns out, nothing has changed. “Who has the time?” she said. When not fishing, she’s busy sending cases of Pisces Tuna out to 48 states—two to three thousand cases a year now. “We sold the old boat a few years ago. If you can believe it, Daryl was allergic to wood! It got too hard to work on.” The new boat is a 52-foot fiberglass ketch, the Skookum Chuck Pisces. “It’s the longest name in the fleet, and the biggest boat in Coos Bay Harbor!” They sold the old Pisces to a younger fisherman—“the next generation.”
The last few years have not been without drama. Bringing the new boat down from the north was almost a disaster. “The bilge pump suddenly didn’t work, we ran into a southerly—fifty-mile-per-hour winds! We were taking in water so bad, and bailing so fast, I was sure we weren’t going to make it.”
They did that time. And the time after that, an electrical fire at sea.
Fishing, you see, is not for the faint of heart. Lucky for us Pisces Tuna has nothing faint about it.
(All the info for Pisces Tuna is still the same: to order, contact Sally and Daryl Bogardus, PO Box 812, 97420, Coos Bay, Oregon, 97420, USA. Phone numbers: (001) 541-266-7336, or the cell phone (001) 541-821-7117.)