I took a power nap after work this morning while he hitched the boat up to Old Red. We're only a couple miles from the Kennebec river where Benedict Arnold portaged his boys around the falls on his way to Quebec. We put the boat in south of town about where the Wesserunset stream runs into the river. Back in the day, this was an extremely important waterway, and many traveling up the river going north, left the river and continued up the stream to avoid the falls and a 10 mile stretch of river that runs west before turning north again.
We wound our way up the stream a couple miles to our old spot. It's a little Island in the stream and full of fiddleheads on a good year. It's a little early this year. Strange, cause we had deep frost and a lot of cold. I ain't complaining, cause we beat the black flies this year and that makes all the difference.
For hundreds of years, the Indians headed south every spring down both the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers. They picked and feasted on fiddleheads all the way to the coast, staying ahead of the swarms of black flies that would soon make life unbearable. Once at the coast, the wind kept them down, and they fished and planted corn where they could.
Anyway, we hit it good today. It was tempting to really haul em in, but I didn't want to spend all week cleaning, blanching, and putting up fiddleheads. We got about 6 gallons, which will be enough. They are covered with a shell that's like a thin onion skin. We pour out a bunch at a time on a quarter inch screen with a box fan underneath. We gently rub them on the screen and the fan blows the "onion skins" off and away. It also filters out and dirt, pine needles, leaves, or whatever. Then we dump em in a cooler of water till we blanch and bag them.
Here's a few pics. I threw in my old Commander to keep it "on topic".
