The Knut Barth and the Salmon Fishing Story

1988

A True Story

How I tried to fool Knut Barth but learned a lesson instead

Written 11/16/2015* 652 Words* By Howard Yasgar

Many years ago, our friend Knut Barth had immigrated to the United States from Norway.

When he came to the United States, he went to work for the Detroit Diesel Company, and eventually became a Vice President of their Military Division, and that’s how we met him.

Knut was an extremely interesting fellow to meet, because he spoke 34 languages fluently, and he said he spoke several more, but not fluently.

In 1988 when we first met him, Knut told us that he had traveled to every country in the world, except

Outer Mongolia.

When Knut retired from Detroit Diesel, he immediately started a company in Michigan called Barco International.

Knut had always claimed that Barco International was a real serious business, but I think he used it as his excuse to travel to Chile.

He often told me that Chile was his favorite place to fish for salmon, and he traveled there often to do it.

Whenever Knut traveled to Chile, he would stop by to see us in our office in Miami, and sometimes he stayed the weekend with us in the Florida Keys.

In 1988, my wife and I had purchased a new home on Plantation Key, and it had a salt-water canal behind it.

One weekend my wife and I were driving down to the Keys, and we stopped at a local Winn Dixie supermarket to pick up supplies for the weekend.

As I browsed the seafood department, I saw that they were having a big sale, they were selling whole 20 lb. Chilean farm raised salmon for only $2.00 per lb. And each fish came in its own individual Styrofoam box.

I immediately had a brilliant idea, I could buy a whole 20 Lb. Salmon, take a picture of it, and tell my friend Knut that I caught it in the canal behind our house.

So, to put the plan in motion, we bought a beautiful 20 lb. Chilean Salmon.

When we got to our house, my wife Katherine took a picture of me with a fishing rod, as if I was fighting the fish in our backyard canal.

I had tied a weight on my fishing line and cast it into the canal, then I posed with my fishing rod bent over like I was fighting a really big fish.

Then my wife took a picture of me standing there holding up the 20 lb. salmon. I was holding it as if I had just caught it.

I thought the pictures came out beautiful, so we mailed them to Knut right away.

After a few days of not hearing from him, I called him up, and I was expecting an excited response from him.

Instead, Knut dryly said, “I see you have a nice Chilean farm raised salmon”.

I asked him, how the hell did you know it was a Chilean farm raised salmon?

“That’s easy Knut said, everyone knows that Chilean farm raised salmon have their tails cut short”.

He said, “All of a fish’s power is in its tail, so by clipping their tails shorter, the farm raised salmon are less powerful and they don’t hurt each other when they are in their holding tanks”.

Knut went on to tell me, “That’s why salmon fishermen in Chile can immediately tell when they hook a farm raised salmon with a cut tail as they are less powerful than a non-farm raised one”.

Well, I didn’t fool Knut about catching a big salmon behind our house, but I did learn a lot about salmon tails and the salmon tasted pretty good.