… Chinook, also known as king salmon, are the largest and most expensive Pacific salmon — when caught in the ocean, where they spend two to five years building muscle and fat reserves for the arduous end-of-life trip back to their spawning grounds. The fish that arrive at Nimbus are beaten up and weathered from fighting upstream for months, and their fillets would be out of place on fine-dining restaurant plates. Still, they’d been good enough to supply people in need with 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of salmon meat in years past.