Anchovies are a secret ingredient that can make meatballs more toothsome, give salad dressings a danker depth and be whipped into butter and tucked under chicken skin. But these stealth culinary shape shifters are the tinned, heavily salted anchovy fillets that bear little to no resemblance to the silver horde of little fish that nourish our local ecosystem. In fact, when put on a pizza and handed to a kid, those salty fillets can turn that person off anchovies for life.

But fresh from the San Francisco Bay, anchovies are an entirely different experience.

Along our coastline or the San Francisco Bay you might spot a frenzy taking place in the water: pods of dolphins, rafts of sea lions, whales breaching, and birds diving. This is due to bait balls of little fish that are a silver-scaled smorgasbord for sea creatures. If you’ve seen whales under the Golden Gate Bridge, lunging for the sky, mouths open, those are humpbacks scooping up as many anchovies as possible.

From the SF Bay to the Farallon Islands, there’s a deep canyon with upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water that anchovies love. According to research biologist Bill Keener of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, during World War II metal nets were stretched under the Golden Gate Bridge to stop torpedoes and submarines. These nets blocked many of the sea creatures from entering the Bay as well.

He explained that there are two species of whales in the Bay: Grey whales feed in the bottom mud (they suck out worms and other protein). And April through October, humpbacks follow the anchovies into the San Francisco Bay. According to Keener, removing the nets following the end of the war and the Marine Mammal Act of 1972 increased the numbers of whales, dolphins and porpoises along the coast. Cleaning up the bay from pollution brought back the anchovies and they have really attracted the sea creatures back to the Bay.

Erik Sandquist, a Marin County native, has been fishing anchovies in the San Francisco Bay for 17 years. “The Bay is so much healthier now than when I started fishing,” he said. “There didn’t used to be much out there, but now the anchovies are so thick, in places you can walk on them.”

Sandquist captures them using a seine operation: His fishing vessel Cape Knox and a smaller skiff have a net that falls between them; they wrap around fish and purse up from the bottom.

They keep the fish alive and transfer them to floating pens behind Scoma’s Restaurant at Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco. It’s a riotous scene where gulls, egrets, herons and pelicans dive bomb the fish pens while sea lions roar and huff from the water. Sometimes there’s an elderly Sicilian man waiting for them as well. In the early morning fishermen and women float up in boats or arrive in cars and buy anchovies by the netful, most often to use as bait for bigger fish, like stripers or halibut.

The first time I went to purchase them, Matt Picardo, who rarely removes his dangling cigarette as he scoops up a netful, asked me if I was going to feed the sea lions with them. He put the flipping fish into a five-gallon bucket and passed it up to me on the dock.

I slipped $30 into the net he held out and then transferred the fish into my cooler. I shut the lid, trying to block out the sounds of frantic fish.

“No, I’m going to eat them,” I told him. “They are delicious.” Humans don’t join in on this bounty as much as we should.

These fish are plentiful, highly sustainable, low in mercury and PCBs, and when you get them fresh and local, they are the most delicious fish you will ever eat. These and other forage fish—like sardines and mackerel—are often made into fishmeal for industrial farms, like salmon farming, which takes three pounds of wildcaught forage fish like anchovies to produce one pound of farmed salmon. It takes over 20 pounds of wild-caught forage fish to produce one pound of farmed tuna. So, it’s much better for the sea if we just eat the little fish.

I asked Keener if we were taking anchovies away from humpback whales by eating them, he laughed. “Plenty of anchovies for everyone. We can’t come close to what whales eat. They eat thousands at a single gulp.”

They are one of these foods that people seem to either hate or love. My neighbor Tom Macey told me that he hated them. Really, really hated them. I assumed he had one on a piece of pizza as a child. These are not the umami bombs of tinned anchovies, but little fresh fish. So I filleted some, dipped them in panko and fried them, then served them with aioli. I told Tom they were baby halibut. (I realize that mislabeling seafood is unethical and often illegal, but I had a point to prove.) I waited until he had eaten several, with great pleasure, and then I revealed, “Aha! You’re eating anchovies! I told you they’re delicious!”

But one of the main deterrents of eating small fish is that they are highly perishable. Even straight out of the water, after two days they become squishy and soft. That’s why you don’t often see them in fish markets. As Sandquist said, “You’ve got to come get them fresh. During the season, we are open every morning.” Just come before 10am and bring cash.

A second issue with small fish is that it’s a lot of work to clean them. There’s a $30 minimum for half a scoop and it’s $40 a scoop. This is a lot of anchovies, so I invite friends over to fillet and preserve them. I call these the Anchovy Olympics. After filleting I rinse them, cover in kosher salt for 20 minutes and then cover them with freshly squeezed lemon juice—Meyer or true lemon both work. Let the fish “cook” in the citrus juice overnight and then pack them in jars with olive oil. You can add a fresh herb sprig or garlic clove if you like. Everyone who helps gets anchovies and a job that is tedious to do alone becomes fun. I’ve opened Anchovy Olympics to the public through my foraging business, Flora & Fungi Adventures.

To join an Anchovy Olympics running once a month through October or until anchovy season ends, sign up for the Flora & Fungi newsletter at FloraAndFungiAdventures.com.