I’ve started a longer-term project than usual to look at fish feasts and see how profitable it is to try to craft them for sale to other guilds, either by fishing for the ingredients yourself or playing around in the auction house.

The first ingredient we will look at is Glacial Salmon. The best place to catch them is in the Grizzly Hills in Northrend, because they come in ponds and can also be caught with a fishing skill of 1. The route I took was to start just below Zeb Halak, follow the river east to the Registration. campgrounds that always had their fair share of pools waiting for me, then I follow the river all the way south to where it meets the sea at Venture Bay and back up the creek heading to Drak Tharon Keep to start the loop again. This last part of the river has fish ponds, however they are not glacial salmon ponds so I ignored them.

I fished until I caught exactly 200 salmon ending at the 85 minute mark and about 3 loops of the route outlined above. Along with the salmon, there were 132 Pygmy Pigfish and a variety of crafting materials from the crates (Boreal Leather Scraps, Cobalt Ore, Frostweave Cloth). All of these non-salmon items sold for a total of 89G at auction.

Now looking at the fish themselves. I saved all of mine for the fish feast experiment that I will post the results of in a few weeks. However, if you want to sell them directly, you have two options.

The first is to sell them raw. These would be purchased by people who are leveling up their cooking skills or by people who want to make their own fish feasts and don’t have time to fish for themselves. On my server Glacial Salmon buy 1g26 each which would make a total selling price of 252G

The other option is to use the power of spices to make Firecracker Salmon. This is a raid booster food that gives a nice +46 spell power and +40 resistance. The additional ingredient needed to make this is northern spices and recently their price has dropped so fast that I’m now picking up 100 lots for 15 silver per spice. So you start with a fish worth 1g26, add 15 silver worth of spices and voila, the finished product is now worth 2g61.

However, this is not as simple as it seems. Firecracker Salmon sells much more slowly than raw Glacial Salmon. This means that if you decide to cook your fish, you will need to be prepared to only post 2-3 stacks to the AH at a time to avoid flooding the market. You should also be prepared for any competition from AH that could quickly drive down the price of this slow-selling hobby food.

The end result of selling the cooked version would end up at a price of 581g (cracker salmon + mats caught – spices bought). This is during the 85-minute drive. The hourly rate would then result in 410 g/h.

There is also a lesson to be learned about the courtesy I found while fishing in the Grizzly Hills for this. For the most part, you can expect to have the entire river to yourself when you fish them. Salmon can be caught elsewhere and there are no fishing quests that require you to be in this area. However, after about 30 minutes of fishing, I found myself trying to land in the same pools as another character. Since he was level 80, I assumed he was after the same fish as me, either as a benefit to him or as a fish feast, so I resigned myself to sharing pools with him and lowering my rate of fish caught per hour. After a few minutes of this, I decided to say hello and ask what he was doing. It turned out that he was new to fishing and was only here to improve his fishing skills. I then spent some time explaining to him that if he wanted to increase his ability through pools, then there were better concentrations in places like the South Sea. He thanked me for my help and flew away, leaving me once again to fish alone in Grizzly Hills. So happy endings all year.