Horacio Savala oversees the fileting and packaging operation for Tilghman Island Seafood’s blue catfish processing facility. Quality control is paramount with the fish on ice from the time they leave the water until placed on the fileting table.
Buena Vista Seafood in San Francisco deals in high-end seafood from all around the world. European blue lobsters, Kambatia Reef Fish from Kenya, California Purple Urchins, and Icelandic Arctic Cod, to name a few.
Now, the company has added wild-caught Chesapeake Blue Catfish to its list of offerings.
“Chesapeake blue catfish check all the boxes,” says Polly Legendre, who’s involved in sales and operations for Buena Vista.
“They’re a great tasting fish, clean and neutral with a nice flake. They’re also an affordable dinner fish whether for white tablecloth restaurants or for the family table. That’s very important in the current state of the nation.”
Legendre said the blue cats check the sustainability box because they’re an invasive species, ”insanely prolific in terms of reproduction. Targeting them for harvest will help ease the toll they’re taking on the rockfish and blue crab populations, both iconic value species that have built the Chesapeake reputation. Tilghman Island Seafood’s processing capacity and dedication to quality control give their filets a long shelf life and are the reason we can get them from the East Coast to the West Coast in great condition. So they’re a sustainable and reliable fishery.
“Finally, and very important,” said Legendre, is the positive social impact for the Chesapeake’s fishing community. “While addressing a real environmental problem, the growing blue catfish industry is also benefiting ice providers, truck drivers, cutters and packagers in the processing facility, and providing a new opportunity for watermen feeling pressure from fewer crabs and rockfish.”
That’s particularly notable, she said, in an era when watermen, here and in other parts of the country, are suffering from more and more restrictions on their harvesting. “This blue cat fishery is adding quota and volume to fisheries, allowing fishermen to catch with abandon. That’s positive for the industry.”
Good diet = Good fish
Unlike other species of bottom-dwelling catfish, blue catfish feed throughout the water column. That diet of other fish, crabs, clams and even rockfish eggs foraged from grasses in spawning grounds, no doubt contributes to the attractive flavor profile that differentiates them from other catfish.
On Tuesday this week, Tilghman Island Seafood Company air-shipped 400 pounds of fresh blue catfish filets westward to Buena Vista, just the latest in many shipments. That’s only a sliver of the estimated 100,000 pounds of fish Tilghman Island is now processing each week for its retail, restaurant and institutional customers such as schools and food banks.
All of those thousands of pounds of fish have been on ice from the time they have been pulled from the Bay’s waters. Tilghman Island Seafood president and owner Nick Hargrove set that water-to-ice standard early on.
Tilghman Island Seafood Vice President Norm McCowan and Office Manager Becky Miller with some of the packaging used to ship orders from coast to coast. Dennis Forney Photos.
He provides insulated composite vats filled with ice for the fishermen and truckers who catch the fish and transport them to the Tilghman processing facility, beside the island’s drawbridge over Knapp’s Narrows. “Keeping the fish on ice throughout the process has become second nature to everyone. Quality is critical to the marketing of them as Wild Caught Chesapeake Blue Catfish. They have to be marketed that way.”
In the past few weeks, Hargrove has flown twice to Boston for, first, a fisheries conference, and then last week to follow up on more potential new business. “We have to have sales,” he said. “I already had a military customer. More may be on the way. You can’t produce 20,000 pounds a day if you have no customers. All of it is wild caught and sustainable. Can’t emphasize how important that is.”
While Hargrove is off cultivating new customers, or out on local waters placing spat on shell for his oyster leasing operations, Vice President Norm McCowan manages Tilghman Island Seafood company. “Nick is a great spokesman with great vision,” said McCowan, “and because he’s a waterman himself, he knows the other watermen and how important the seafood industry is to the region.”
McCowan said Hargrove gets calls almost every day from fishermen wanting to sell blue cats, while he and office manager Becky Miller handle shipments, processing and packaging. “We send out samples every day to restaurants and other seafood distributors like Buena Vista. We are meeting the demand for the market we’re creating but we know our potential market is much larger than just state and local. Texas, for example, is the largest catfish-eating state so we know we need to penetrate the South with our product.”
Exponential growth
The Tilghman operation is a busy place, with trucks always coming and going–coming with iced fish and leaving with more vats filled with ice for the next catch.
“We’re growing exponentially,” said McCowan “Eighty percent of our sales are frozen, with 20 percent going to the fresh market, locally and across Maryland and as far away is San Francisco. But the catfish problem in the Bay is huge. Like Nick says, we have to eat our way out if it. We have to take out 15 million pounds of fish a year just to keep up with the current balance. We’ve processed a half million pounds of fish in the past two months–2.4 million pounds since we started a year and a half ago or so. A guy is coming in today with 2,400 pounds of fish. At 60 to 70 cents a pound, that’s a nice check for him.”
At 30 percent yield, those 2,400 pounds of fish will produce about 800 pounds of filets.
The numbers keep coming. Hargrove said it’s estimated that the total blue catfish biomass in the Chesapeake is about 150,000 tons, or 300 million pounds. In Virginia’s James River, where the blue catfish were first introduced as a recreational species in the 1970s, Hargrove said it’s estimated they now represent 80 to 90 percent of the river’s entire biomass. “I’ve seen as much as 200,000 pounds come out of the Potomac in one day,” said Hargrove. “With each fish producing up to 20,000 offspring a year, they’re not going anywhere. We’re never getting rid of them.”
According to a Department of Natural resources press release, Maryland’s watermen harvested 609,525 pounds of blue catfish in 2013. By 2023, that number had jumped to 4.2 million pounds and is still rising.
With the help of Maryland’s two US Senators, Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, and First District Congressman Andy Harris, more than $3 million in federal money has been allocated to stimulate blue catfish processing facilities like Tilghman Island Seafood which is currently Maryland’s only United States Department of Agriculture-certified processing facility.
Hargrove said he is interested in expanding to another facility in Talbot County, preferably on Tilghman Island. “This is where we want to be,” said Hargrove. He said he would also be interested in adding an automatic fileting machine to his operation if he would qualify for grant money to help with the million-dollar expenditure. “It’s a lot of money but it would enable us to process four or five times as much fish as we do now. I can’t wait for that though. We have to keep operating and expanding as we are now.”
He said if he were able to get an automatic machine, current cutters could be redeployed downstream in the operation for other aspects such as portioning, creating more of the popular blue catfish nuggets, packaging and shipping.
Harris said he is also working with at least two other parties on the Eastern Shore who are interested in becoming blue catfish processors.
Big buy from USDA?
Meanwhile, at the federal delegation’s urging, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service has recently advertised draft specifications allowing it to purchase wild-caught blue catfish filets for national-level institutions, including school systems, penitentiaries, and military installations.
The USDA requires a federal inspector to be onsite at facilities such as Tilghman Island Seafood whenever it is processing fish, to guarantee its safety and quality. Catfish are the only category of fish for which the government’s most rigorous inspections are required. Up until now, according to Harris, and due to lobbying pressure from southern, farm-raised catfish producers, the AMS could only buy farm-raised catfish.
The new draft specifications allowing the government purchase of wild-caught catfish are in a comment period before final distribution to potential bidders.
“The good news is they buy by the truckload,” said McCowan. “That’s about 38,000 pounds, which we can do.”
“This would be a big deal for the industry,” said Hargrove. “Eight months ago when the AMS announced plans to purchase farm-raised catfish for its programs, it was for 800,000 pounds of filets. This time around we’ll try to get into it. We’ll bid.”
He said there’s another plus for wild caught blue catfish. According to a recent Virginia Tech study he said, the heart-healthy omega-3 oil levels–found in many fish–are several times higher in blue cats than in farm-raised catfish.
Hargrove noted that Tilghman Island Seafood has recently been certified for exporting overseas to Poland and Asia.
“There’s definitely room for growth in blue cats,” he said.
Buena Vista’s Legendre will be traveling this week from San Francisco to Tilghman Island for further reviewing, videoing, and discussions with Hargrove and his crew as she continues her plans for ramping up sales of blue catfish west of the Mississippi.
To say she’s excited about the prospects is an understatement.
“I want to sell in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle and San Diego. The fish and its quality are important to the California chefs but they’re also concerned about the sustainability, the problems associated with invasive species, and helping the fishing communities. We need to let the nation and world know that in this case harvesting this resource is solving more problems than it is causing. I want to get chefs on some of the cooking shows talking about the virtues of Wild Caught Chesapeake Blue Catfish.”
Upward trajectory comes to mind.
“It’s hold on to your hat with this one,” said Hargrove. “This is still just the beginning.”
Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972. He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.
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