Page 64 - Southern Oregon Magazine Fall 2022

the good life | adventure
neck of the woods | theatre

Own a

Grocery Nate Van Amburg, owner and operator of Nate’s Rogue Adventures has

Store been operating drift boat and lodge stay commercial fishing trips on
with your friends the Wild and Scenic Rogue River for the last three years. He says his
guests regularly catch 30-pound Chinooks in the fall between the end of
& neighbors August and into the first week of November.

Coho also come in the fall, a little later in October according to Van
Amburg. “They are the brightest, tastiest meat of any of the fish in my
opinion. The gold standard is 30 fish days catching mostly "half pound-
ers,” a single salt fish that comes back to its home river after only one
year in the ocean. All the other anadromous fish take multiple years
in fertile waters of Alaska to fatten up, reach maturity, and return to
spawn. These fish are fiesty and kind of aggressive, so they are a lot of
fun to catch by the dozen.”
When you join the Co-op, you become more
than just a member – you become an owner. Because the fish are so plentiful, Van Amburg offers an on the fly fish fry
with fish he knows he will catch on the last two days of his trips. “I have
Everyone is welcome, ownership is optional. a signature move where I pull the boat over while my DUDE [the guest]
is fighting the fish and pull out my sashimi kit and get ready to filet the
N The Café fish and serve it minutes after it comes out of the water. For shock value
—
I open the fish up and offer the beating heart to its captor as a rite of
A
D
— passage for catching a huge king salmon. I love how peoples’ eyes light
up when the taste and texture of this nearly-alive fish absorbs directly
945 S Riverside Ave • (541)779-2667 into their mouth. I add a little soy, wasabi, limes and yucatan habanero
sauce. I picked this up from fishing trips to Mexico, Costa Rica, and
medfordfood.coop/ownership Hawaii. Those guides showed me the whole presentation and no one in
the Rogue River Canyon was doing it.”
62 www.southernoregonmagazine.com | fall 2022