The covid-19 pandemic has disrupted seafood supply chains around the world, but some small-scale fishermen and processors have managed major shifts by expanding their direct marketing efforts, and focusing on quality and price. Before starting Gulf of Maine Sashimi, a small-scale fish processing and distribution company, President and CEO Jen Levin had worked for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, managing the organization’s sustainable seafood program.
“I looked at the volume of some fisheries like Icelandic haddock and Norwegian cod and the prices they can sell for. We can’t compete. Last year, we harvested just 17 percent of the Georges Bank/Gulf of Maine quota for haddock, 8 percent of the pollock quota, partly because fishermen can’t afford to fish at these prices.” While Levin acknowledges that the price of quota for choke species like cod and flounder is part of the problem, she believes the main factor is price at the dock. “We started looking for high-end markets. And we started working with fishermen to train them to land a high-quality fish.”
The process Levin teaches to the fishermen who sell to her is what the Japanese call ikejime.
“It means, to kill with purpose,” she says. Levin buys from about 20 boats, including hook boats, draggers making short tows and gillnetters making short sets, so the fish come aboard alive. “And we have one weir fisherman who brings mackerel,” she says.
“The fish are killed with a brain spike, then followed with two cuts to bleed them, one at the throat and one at the tail. Then they are put into a bleed tank, which is just a tote with water and a little bit of ice in it, we don’t want it too cold because we want the fish to move around and get the blood out. Then the fish are put into an ice-saltwater slurry, and that’s how we get them.” It’s low tech, but according to Levin, she is also talking to the processing equipment manufacturer, Baader. “They sell a machine you can mount on the rail that stuns and bleeds the fish, so they can go right into the slurry.”
While Levin was selling to high-end chefs all over the country before the virus hit, the closure of most restaurants hurt business initially, but Gulf of Maine Sashimi has bounced back. “We’ve had to just bootstrap and find ways to move fish,” she says, having just dropped an order to this writer’s daughter, Oona Molyneaux at Farm Drop in Portland — small world.
The bootstrapping worked, according to one of Levin’s primary harvesters, Joe Letourneau, who fishes his 42-foot boat the Lady Rebecca out of Newburyport, Mass. “When [covid-19] first started, I was very close to buying a box truck and hiring somebody to sell fish,” says Letourneau. “But Jen shifted back to selling direct to consumers and started taking all my fish again. It’s great because she guarantees a certain percentage over the auction.”
Letourneau lands high-quality fish that are not always met with correspondingly high prices at the auction. “One trip we landed 2,100 pounds of pollock and got 35 to 45 cents at the auction. Our fuel bill was $21 higher than what we got for our fish after processing fees.”
According to Letourneau, his main fishery is groundfish, caught with four DNG jigging machines and rod and reel, but he also longlines and uses the jigging machines for mackerel. “I built and designed most of the rigging for the mackerel,” says Letourneau.
Longlining, Letourneau fishes a quarter-mile groundline with 80 hooks in areas with big cod or haddock, and he also catches an occasional halibut. “And when we flood our mackerel market and want a day off, we go tuna fishing,” he says.
Letourneau’s crew performs ikejime on groundfish as soon as they come aboard. “I have a guy who brain spikes it,” he says. “Then he cuts the gill, but not the artery, then the tail cut. Then we put it in a bleed tank, which is just a tote without holes, with a hose in it and some ice. We put about 10 fish in there for about 10 minutes and then load into a 1,000-pound insulated vats. It’s got about 700 pounds of fish and seawater ice slurry.” Letourneau delivers the fish in the vats, noting that the core temperature of the fish is between 32.2 and 32.8 degrees. “It’s a lot of time and effort, but we have gotten very proficient at it.”
With tuna, Letourneau has a different process. “We tail rope them and put a mouth hook in, and swim the fish until it recovers and tries to outswim the boat, about 30 minutes. Then we brain spike it, cut the gill membrane and the tail, and tow it backward for another 10 minutes.” He then brings it aboard and cuts the gills, guts it and packs it with ice in a tuna bag from local gear supplier Tightlines Tackle.
With mackerel, Letourneau reports he does not bleed them. “They go straight into slush,” he says. “We get $2 a pound for food grade.”
On the West Coast, Scott Breneman of the Newport Beach Dory Fleet Market has a somewhat vertically integrated operation, catching fish for his own market. With two 31-foot boats, the Isla Rose and the Circle Hook, Breneman fishes blackcod and thornyhead with longline; rockfish with rod and reel; and swordfish using deep-set buoy gear.
“I was landing live fish, primarily for the Asian market. But with the restaurants closed, I’m selling more to a couple of people who deliver direct. They’re doing a few hundred orders a week,” Breneman says, noting that he can tell the orders are coming from some of his regular customers. “I can tell by the way they want their fish cut.”
“When the pandemic started, we had a terrible week, I was worried. But now people are desperate, now demand has doubled. People are tired of the frozen hamburger they bought. They are lined up to get into the market.” According to Breneman, whereas once everyone would come to the market, he sees individuals coming to buy for a group.
Breneman notes that he has always focused on quality and finding buyers willing to pay what that quality is worth. His boats are small, fast and versatile. “I need speed. We’re fishing sometimes 100 miles out. Because of quotas, I don’t need a lot of space, just get out there and back.”
Breneman has boxes on deck that he had specially made in China. “I worked through a company called Ali Baba and had to order 60,” he says. “They’re like Yeti, hard plastic, but shaped to fit the boat.” Breneman fills the boxes with saltwater ice, and uses an aerator to keep his fish alive. “It’s a primitive system,” he says. Breneman notes that the deep-set buoy gear he uses for swordfish is different because when he gets a fish the buoy pops up.
“When we get a fish, we harpoon it and bleed it,” he says. “We have two big insulated fish holds belowdeck for when we get a nice catch of swordfish.” He also buys salmon and other fish from fishermen as far north as Washington state, and the Hepp family of Santa Barbara, Calif.
In Southeast Alaska, Tyson Fick fishes for Taku River Reds — part of Yakobi Fisheries — which ships salmon all over the United States and to Europe. Fick reports that mail-order sales have tripled in response to the covid-19 pandemic. “We’re proving the value of delivering a high-quality product,” he says, “so that more independent fishermen can make more on their fish.” To that end, Fick and the team at Yakobi Fisheries go to great lengths to produce a quality fish.
“We start out the day with the first set and just let the net hang loose. We don’t want to tug on the fish.” Fick fishes a 200-fathom gillnet 60 meshes deep. “We use 5- to 6-inch mesh, just enough to get the head stuck. When we haul, we like to see them just swimming statically.” Once aboard, Fick and one or two crew members pull the gills on the salmon and put them in totes of saltwater to bleed.
Once the net is hauled, the fish are gutted and pressure bled. Pressure bleeding is the key to quality, according to Fick. “I learned it from the previous owner to the boat,” he says. He and his crew put the headed and gutted salmon into a tray and then shoot a low-pressure water needle to the main artery along the backbone of the fish and essentially flush out the remaining blood.
“Then we rinse the fish and pack the bellies with ice and pack them in slush ice in the hold,” says Fick. “I always have plenty of ice.”
Fick sorts the fish by species and ices them into Nomar brailing bags in four side holds, and loads up to 1,000 pounds into two totes in his center hold. “When we have too many, we off-load to a tender, the Marsons,” says Fick.
Chris McDowell owns the venerable wooden tender the Marsons. “We bought her about 10 years ago,” says McDowell. “The first thing we did was put in an 18-ton IMS [Integrated Marine Systems] refrigerated seawater system,” says McDowell. “It’s electric, so we also put in a 27.5-kW MER genset.” Depending on distance from the processing plant, McDowell loads the salmon into the RSW hold, or keeps the iced fish in totes on deck. Either way, the fish are tracked from boat to consumer, enabling the buyer to know their fisherman, as the company website promotes.
According to one of Fick’s European customers, Caroline Bennett, owner of Sole of Discretion, a silver lining of the pandemic is what it has done for small-scale operations. “It may well have saved us,” says Bennett, who visited Fick in 2019, before buying. “We sat at his dining room table, and I’ve never satiated myself so fully on salmon roe as I did there, it was truly memorable. Our sales have tripled, and as prices on the market collapsed, finally the fishers saw virtue in landing to a co-op that offered fixed prices.”
Paul Molyneaux is the Boats & Gear editor for National Fisherman and the author of “The Doryman’s Reflection.”
