Skipper Jack's Tales of Yellowfin and Other Fish

Hello shipmates and welcome one and all to my local pub, the Salty Dog. Tis from ‘ere that I’ll be recalling my tales of fishing on the high seas. I own a trawler named the DSCallards and we operate out of Fowey in Cornwall.

I’m Skipper Jack and I’m joined on every fishing adventure by my First Mate, Gerald. Now it might not look like it from the picture, but we’ve got a whole host of technology on board. We’ve got fish finders and electronic depth gauges. We’ve even got an iPad. 

We catch loads of fish, but we’ve always found one thing very difficult and that’s how to understand all the data we record in our MySQL database and make sense of it. That is until now.

We’ve just bought this application called Yellowfin. It’s a tool that allows us to present and easily understand our business information. As a business we have to be environmentally friendly and record data on every fish we catch. Some of our fish is line caught, so we need to feed this data back to our customers so that they can let their customers (the local restaurants) know what’s available.

Gerald updates the database while we’re on the return journey home. Then we run Yellowfin on the iPad to see the results. We can make better business decisions on where to fish and when. I can see how much profit we can make before entering the harbour. Back on dry land, my missus runs Yellowfin from our office. Well, actually it’s not actually an office, more like a shed really, where she repairs the nets and does all manner of administration for the business. 

I can comment on the reports in the dashboard while we’re on the way home and she can get in touch with our customers and let me know who is going to buy the fish. All before we reach dry land and the safety of The Salty Dog.

Yellowfin makes the job easy because after you’ve created your views of your data, reporting and dashboard creation is quick. Here’s the detail of our last catch as shown from a Yellowfin row based report.

Gerald can knock this sort of report up in minutes. All you have to remember is to change the Data Output area to ‘Row Based’.

Then just add your view objects as normal. Notice the heading changes to ‘Rows’ on a row based report.

To get the formatting of your rows how you want them, access the report in Edit mode and choose ‘Display’ from the menu. Choose the row you want to edit.

I used a suffix of ‘lbs’ to record the unit of weight for the total number of fish caught.

A quick recipe from our friend Angela Hartnett

We thought you might like to try one of our recommended fish dishes. We know this chef called Angela and she created a very tasty red mullet recipe.

Red mullet with linguine tossed in chilli and garlic

Ingredients

For the sauce

·         4 tsp finely sliced red chilli

·         4 tsp finely sliced garlic

·         125ml/4fl oz white wine

·         125ml/4fl oz fish or vegetable stock

·         4 whole red mullet, filleted, pin boned and cut into strips

·         2 tbsp flatleaf parsley

·         1 tbsp basil leaves

·         1 lemon, zest only

·         salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the pasta dough

·         300g/10½oz Italian ‘00’ flour

·         3 free-range eggs

·         1 tbsp olive oil

·         pinch salt

• For the pasta, blend the flour and eggs in a food processor to fine crumbs, then add the olive oil and salt and pulse to just combine.
• Remove the mixture from the processor, and pull the dough together into a ball. Knead the dough until smooth.
• Wrap the pasta dough in cling film and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.
• Once rested, take the dough out of the fridge and roll out to about 1cm/½in thick.
• Pass the rolled dough through a pasta machine, starting with the widest setting, and reducing the setting each time until on the finest setting.
• Change to the linguine cutter on the pasta machine and pass the pasta through once more.
• Weigh out about 35g/1¼oz of pasta per person.,Hang the remaining pasta over the back of a chair and allow to dry.
• For the sauce, heat a frying pan until hot, add the olive oil, chilli and garlic and gently fry until just softened.
• Add the red mullet and gently fry for a couple of minutes, then add the white wine and cook until the volume of liquid has reduced.
• Add the stock to the mullet and cook until reduced again.
• Meanwhile, bring a pan of salted water to the boil, add the pasta and cook until it floats to the surface and is just tender.
• Drain the pasta and stir straight into the sauce.
• Finish with the herbs and lemon zest then season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

I hope you all found this useful and I’ll be sharing some more of my Yellowfin experiences soon.

Skipper Jack

For more information visit:  www.dscallards.com