What an incredibly fun and fulfilling day this was! We finally saw sea rocket in the flesh (well, sand actually), found sardines (a mere 50 feet away from shore), and dropped in on a local salt company. It was like a scavenger hunt, which is how a lot of our days have felt, wandering around parts of San Diego county where we’ve never ventured before and being pointed in different directions by each person we try to get information from… We started this day off with a visit to Tuna Harbor, since I guess many of the fishermen there catch tuna. It’s right on the water in downtown San Diego, next door to The Fish Market restaurant to whom a lot of the fishermen directly sell their catch, and just north of the Chesapeake Fish Co. which is a wholesale distributor that most of them also sell to.

We wandered uninvited onto one of the commercial piers looking for anyone who might be willing to sell fish to us directly, or connect us to people who might, as well as tell us who catches what kind of local fish. A couple of guys working on their boat chatted with us for a bit, pointing to the other boats around us and naming the owners and types of boats they were. A bunch of fish was out of season and other seasons had not started up yet, so it was pretty quiet. He said that another pier further out were where the fishermen who catch sardines docked, so we next went there and found a good number of people at work mending nets and fixing up their boats. We talked to a couple of fishermen who said they’d be happy to sell fish directly to us, but weren’t in the sardine business. We took some names and numbers and a lead to the sardine source which is a bait fish company in town. They have a few locations including on Point Loma and at Mission Bay, where a lot of the sport fishing charters go out of, so we planned to head there later in the day.

In the meantime, we’d been wanting to find sea rocket growing in the wild so that we could photograph our namesake and see what it looks like in comparison to the photos we found on-line. The scientist we talked to in the botany department at the Natural History Museum told us that we might find it on the dunes in Imperial Beach, where she had grown up, and to ask about it at the Tijuana Estuary which is located nearby. We paid a visit to the visitor’s center, where some very helpful and knowledgeable rangers knew exactly what we were looking for and told us where to find it. (Mainly we have found that even those people with horticultural bents have never heard of sea rocket, so this was a good sign.) However, when we asked “have you seen any sea rocket around here?” the ranger answered candidly “unfortunately, yes!” I had read that it was a bit of a weed, a slightly invasive plant that proliferates easily, but I still took offense at this comment, since he had no idea why we were asking. I was loathe to tell him that we intended to name our baby restaurant after this unfortunately occurring species! But we had a good chat, and a good laugh about it after he coerced the reason for our interest in it out of us.

He pointed us towards the Coronado Strand, the south part of it where there is a state beach and directly across from that, a sandy area on the bay side. We pulled into the deserted parking lot and ran through the tunnel eagerly (after Dennis stopped to take photographs of a guy racing around on a wind sail-driven recumbent bicycle.) I spotted a tiny little plant with pale purple 4-petal flowers as I’d seen on-line, but wondered if that could be it, as diminutive as it was. As it turns out, the plant is so delicately small that any photo you might find of it has obviously zoomed way in on it in order to show the human eye it’s shape and color. There were tons of tiny little specimens, scattered along the sandy shore as though the wind had come along, picked up the reproductive pods and redeposited them ad hoc along its route. We did find one or two larger bushes of it, where time had allowed the sea rocket to grow wider and spread like an ice plant, creating lovely and full but low to the ground patches. Dennis promptly laid down on top of one, crushing it viciously, but I made sure to fluff it back up after our photo shoot.

Since we were in the south bay already, and Dennis had researched a salt works company located in Chula Vista, we stopped there next, parking in a dusty dirt lot next to a very old, kind of western looking building with a long track leading up to what looked like a granary at one end. We found a small office tucked in the back, and interrupted a couple of gentlemen to ask the usual questions- How long has South Bay Salt Works been in business? What is the process by which you collect and manufacture the salt? How is it cleaned and ground and distributed? Who do you sell to (or through) and what are the uses of the salt? Dennis and I have become quite good impromptu investigational interviewers, rolling with the punches, the attitudes, the personalities and the situations in which have found ourselves recently. This salt, to our surprise, while “harvested” locally in the salt flats in San Diego bay, is sold nationally (and possibly internationally) mainly for industrial uses rather than for direct human consumption, is not thoroughly cleaned and processed like the table salt (or even sea salt) we have come to know, and is sold in three different granule sizes- fine, which is not that fine, medium coarse, and very coarse (chunky). It can be used for cooking, curing or preserving, etc. but only a handful of restaurants in the area seem to know or care about it and make the trip to this odd old building occasionally to pick up a 50 pound bag! We were told that some individuals buy it for its healing properties- for taking salt baths (like with Epsom Salts). Of course, you can get that for free (but cold) by simply swimming in it’s original source, the ocean…but I digress. The salt is light grey in color and would need to be ground finer for use on salads and general salting of finished foods, but it’s local, inexpensive, and makes a great story! So of course we picked up a 50 pound bag on our way out, as starter stock, and to use to test recipes with. Let me rephrase. I picked up the 50 pound bag and carried it back to the car myself, after one of the warehouse guys realized how far away we’d parked and bailed out of his duties at the bottom of the ramp. Please, Dennis, ladies first!

Our final task for the day was to hunt down one of the bait barges we’d heard were the only source for sardines around. I felt a little uneasy looking for bait to serve to our future guests, but we’d been told by several fishermen types that they were perfectly good and always kept fresh for the sport fishing boats so in reality were fresher than a lot of other fish you will find around here. We inquired at a fishing shop first with no luck, then were pointed to the part of the bay from which the larger charter companies leave. There we found a trailer where you can buy tickets and fake bait, but still no live fish. The guy behind the counter said, “You can get some sardines 50 feet that way,” but before it dawned on us that he was pointing out over the water, we started walking in that direction as he added “if you want to swim.” We had come so close, but were still boat ride away, since as it turns out, the sardines are kept in cages under the water at these bait docks floating out in the marina. The sport fishing boats simply pull up to them on their way out, buy a few “scoops” (about 10 pounds each) and keep them fresh on their boats the entire day at sea, recirculating water into the hold. We thought that getting someone to bring back some bait fish for us at the end of their trip might be the only way to acquire them, but about a week later we found out that you can indeed get sardines from one or two distributors- it’s just not a very common thing to find at restaurants, so most fisheries don’t bother with them.