Sally Ferns Barnes, 70, is the last person in Ireland to exclusively smoke wild salmon. This year, she will take just 225 wild Atlantic salmon into her tiny smokery in West Cork, down from 370 last year. The fish are caught from the Blackwater River by fifth-generation fisherman Mikey Walsh and Eamon Uniacke, who supplement their income with other jobs.
Barnes began smoking fish in 1979 after her then-husband, a fisherman, was not paid for his catch. The buyer eventually gave her a kiln as partial restitution, which she used to teach herself cold-smoking. Cold smoking preserves the fish by dehydrating it with smoke at a low temperature, extending its shelf life for months.
Her Irish Wild Smoked Salmon has won acclaim, including Supreme Champion at the Great Taste Awards in 2006. Chef Richard Corrigan called it "the best food present anyone had ever given him" in 2013. The salmon is described as butter-soft, with a delicate flavour, best eaten on brown soda bread with tea.
However, dwindling wild salmon numbers due to overfishing and pollution make her product rarer each year. A ban on sea fishing of wild salmon was imposed in Ireland in 2007, restricting fishing to rivers. Between 2007 and 2017, Barnes sourced salmon from Scotland due to pollution in Irish rivers, but that fishery also closed.
