Same Dinner Table, Different Ocean: EHT’s Jake Filarski Brings Bristol Bay Sockeye Home with Salty Dog Seafood

He learned to fish in the back bays. Now he pulls wild sockeye out of the world’s largest salmon run, and this weekend he’s bringing it home to South Jersey.

If you grew up around here, you probably know the kind of night Jake Filarski is talking about.

Somebody comes in off the water with a cooler full of fish. Word gets around. By dinnertime the house is full of family and friends, and everyone is swapping stories over the fresh catch.

“Catching fish and bringing them back to friends and family was always the most rewarding part,” said Filarski, who grew up in Egg Harbor Township. “It’s always been one of the best ways for us to bring the community together.”

These days his catch comes from Bristol Bay, Alaska, home of the world’s largest sockeye salmon run. Through his new business, Salty Dog Seafood, he’s sending it back to the same South Jersey tables he grew up around. On Nov. 14 and 15, you can buy it from him in person at Reed’s Organic Farm & Animal Sanctuary.

The journey from Seaview Harbor to Bristol Bay has been amazing.

The Kid at the End of the Dock

Filarski’s dad kept a boat at Seaview Harbor Marina, in the very last slip, with what Jake still calls “the best view of the bay.” Tied up nearby was the boat that really mattered: a 15-foot inflatable dinghy that he and his brother took everywhere.

“My brother and I would spend endless days running all over in it, from Atlantic City all the way down to Corson’s Inlet,” he said. “We would fish, dive, chase waves, and do everything in that boat.”

The docks taught him more than fishing. Most of the boat owners around him were business owners and tradesmen, and he watched how they worked. “I saw what it took to get what you wanted from an early age,” he said, “and I also saw the benefits of owning your own business.”

So he started his own, several of them. He sold bait on the docks. He worked as a mate on other people’s boats. He scrubbed hulls for a cleaning service he named, with a straight face, Beautiful Bottoms. “My income has revolved around the ocean since I first figured out how to make money,” he said.

Then, at 12, he went on his first overnight trip out to the canyons. “Leaving sight of land and never knowing what you might catch next was huge for me,” he said. “The endless possibilities of what’s out in the ocean still get me as excited as 12-year-old Jake.”

The Flight He Never Took

Like a lot of kids who grew up on the water, Filarski watched Deadliest Catch and wondered what it would be like. A family friend from Pennsylvania spent his summers in Alaska fishing with a man named Captain Steve, so Jake reached out. At 22, Steve gave him a shot.

The job in Bristol Bay was supposed to last six weeks.

Before it was over, Filarski walked into Bear Trail Lodge, a fly-fishing lodge, and told them two things: he could fly fish, and he had a captain’s license. They hired him on the spot. He canceled his flight home and stayed six months.

He spent the next two summers guiding anglers through Katmai National Park. He went on to commercial fish and to run a charter boat off Kodiak Island. That was almost seven years ago, and he hasn’t stopped going back.

Six Weeks, Four Bunks, 32 Feet

Each summer, home is the Emerald Sea, a 32-foot gillnetter built by Marco Marine in 1978. “She’s a classic,” Filarski said.

Picture it: four bunks squeezed into the bow, a galley with big windows that let the light pour in, and every meal cooked on a two-burner propane stove. Filarski drives from the flybridge up top. Below him on the back deck, his crew of Tanner, Pearce, and Justin work the net as it goes in and out of the water, sometimes hundreds of times in a single day.

They keep that up for six-plus weeks, with no days off.

“We spend every minute of every day together, within inches of each other,” he said. “I really love the people I work with. You become closer with them than with anyone else in your world.”

Every Fish Through Human Hands

That crew is the reason the fish tastes the way it does.

As the net comes back over the stern roller, Tanner, Pearce, and Justin pick each sockeye out by hand. “Every fish that’s caught goes through a deckhand’s hands first,” Filarski said. Each one is bled right away and goes straight into holds of seawater chilled to just above freezing.

At the end of the day the catch goes to a tender, a larger boat that carries it to a processor on shore, close to where the fish were caught. There it’s filleted, deboned, vacuum-sealed, and frozen. From Alaska, the fillets ship to Seattle and are then trucked across the country. They’re held at -10°F the whole way so they arrive as fresh as the day they were packed.

Back Where It Started

Filarski never planned to make fishing his living. “Somehow I never stopped pursuing it,” he said. “A lot has changed, but the same ideas and principles I grew up around still hold true.”

The boat is bigger and the water is colder, but the reason hasn’t changed since the dinghy days. He still wants to come home and feed the people he cares about.

“Nothing fulfills me more than being able to provide the freshest, sustainably harvested seafood to the community I grew up in,” he said.

He has bigger plans, too. Filarski wants Salty Dog to connect working fishermen directly with the people who eat their catch, with several orders a year and more kinds of Alaskan fish on the way. “We’re starting small,” he said, “but at the end of the day, I want to continue to be someone people can trust for the best seafood possible.”

Get Yours This Weekend

For years, getting fish from Jake meant knowing him personally. Now anyone can.

Saturday, Nov. 14, and Sunday, Nov. 15, Filarski will have a Salty Dog Seafood table with wild Alaskan sockeye at Reed’s Organic Farm & Animal Sanctuary. Stop by, meet the guy who caught it, ask him about the Emerald Sea, and take home salmon that was in Bristol Bay this summer.

Can’t make it this weekend? You can still order:

• Order online at https://www.saltydogseafoods.com/and pick up at a designated South Jersey location.
• Join the email list so you hear first when the next order opens. Orders run only a few times a year.
• Follow along at @salty_dog_seafoods on Instagram for pickup dates, new fish, and life aboard the Emerald Sea.

Then do what Jake has been doing since he was a kid: call your people over, light the grill, and share the catch.