Right now, most New Zealanders can't afford to go and have a piece of kaimoana from the
supermarket, you know, it's too expensive, it's old, the quality is poor, there's no
story to it, it's just kind of hollow.
We're a Pacific Island nation surrounded by seawater and the hardest thing to get our
hands on is kaimoana.
Fisherman's Radio Gravity copy.
Yeah morning, Mary, we're just leaving the harbour and we're heading over to Half Moon Bay.
Good as gold, I'll keep a close ear for you and catch you when you're ready, ok?
Yeah beauty, thanks, Mary.
Thank you.
When I first started fishing and I was running my own boat we were using industrial
methods of fishing, mainly pots fishing. We were doing really well, sort of averaging about
750 to 800 kilograms of whole fish a day. And then over time I just kind of started to see
how devastating it was on the fish stocks. And I think that's probably one thing that
humans need to look at themselves is, you know, over time we've become super efficient at
it but it just puts so much pressure in such a short amount of time on a wild food resource
like fish. But yeah it just didn't sit well with us and the answer was just to take less fish,
it just made sense to go direct to market.
So we're using hand lines today to catch our fish, it's easier to manage when you're fishing
by yourself or if you've got one other on the boat. This is a pretty modest setup, it's
just a little bit of rope and some lead weights and some hooks onto the right you know you
don't need all the expensive flash gear.
Our mission was to try and give back to the wild fish stocks that have been giving for
so many years.
From a financial perspective if were fishing for the bigger companies for blue cod we'd
be achieving between 3.50 a kilogram to five dollars a kilo and with our structure selling
whole and catching fish with hook and line we're achieving 20 to 22.50 a kilo, so it's
you know four times better off money which means we can afford to take four times less fish.
It was just an absolute no-brainer for us. It is really sustainable to fish like
this because there's only a certain amount of hooks that you're putting in the water
which means you're minimizing the amount of fish that you can harvest, as opposed to say
a trawl net where you don't really have a gauge on that, it's just whatever you pull
up in the process. This way is just selecting a few fish that we're after for the orders
that we've got.
The methods of fishing that we're using with hook and line, it's less stressful than if
they're all trapped in a cage or all trapped and drowning in a net. We're not taking one
species out all year round, we're only ever dedicating our time and effort into that space
when the fish are in season, so when it's of you know best nutritional value for us to
be consuming as humans. When you are bulk harvesting you can't look after the fish as well as you
would if you're doing it on a small scale. The chefs get it and they have that appreciation
for it so then they honor the product as well. I mean they always kind of say to me,
it's easy to cook this product because it's so beautiful when we get it. There's
a reason why it is beautiful and it's because we are connected to it in a deep way. We use
an ancient Japanese technique called ikejime on the boat. For most fish it's that
first gill plate that goes up into the brain cavity and you just give it a wee twist and that's it. It's the
most humane way to kill a fish and to honour that fish as well. At the end of the day you're
taking a life to feed another, I think it's important you know if you are deeply connected
to that space to kind of honour it in that way and it's an intimate connection that I
have for those few seconds before I take its life, it's like kind of calm and peaceful, it
kills it straight away. So to give you a time frame, it's under five minutes from the time
that that fish is hooked till the time I hold it to the surface to the time I put it on
our mattress and ikejime it.
Most of the time it just comes to you in a cardboard box and it's already filleted and
you don't really know or understand the wastage that goes with that. For blue cod for example
it's 1.6 kilos to get one kilo of boneless fillets, so ultimately off every ton of fish
you're throwing 1600 kgs of fish over the sides. It's a massive waste and that's why
we do whole fish, it just kind of ticks all the boxes with what we believe in.
We only catch to order. How that works is we'll send out a bulk email to all of our
customers, we let them know specifically what species of fish we're going to be targeting
based on what season it is and then go and try and achieve those orders that we've got
and only ever taking what those orders are. There's no such thing as bycatch, everything
that we catch on the Gravity has value.
Cod's a really popular fish on Stewart Island. You can't really beat Stewart Island
blue cod, especially when you get it straight from the fisherman like we do with with Gravity,
it comes straight off their boat.
[Music]
[Children speaking]
In early days for us we were doing about three and a half thousand hours of engine time on the clock, that's not including,
you know, the nights that we were sleeping away. We've managed to cut that down to about
700 hours a year. So it's a considerable decrease in the time that we spend away from our family.
It was sort of more a lifestyle choice for us, it was our way of giving back to the wild
food resource that has given so much to myself and Anna and our families and our community
as well. Yeah we are, we're going to cook the frames, for sure, and give it to the chickies.
We are very connected to the land, as much as the sea, we're part of nature, there's no denying it.
[There you go, darling.]
Our sustainability and our ethical approach on the water, same deal here.
Seasons is massive for us, we tune in with nature we've been trying to grow as much food as we possibly
can to sustain our little family.
We have been at our property for around eight years. We went on a journey of trying
to eat organically and trying to grow as much food as we could so that we knew where our
food was coming from and what was going in it.
The children love picking food with us. My youngest, Aurora, she loves helping out in the garden.
Forest has a nickname, Forest the Forager; his education is largely around these living life
skills like growing and harvesting food and he has a passion for fishing like his father.
[Is that for me? Thank you!]
Aurora seems to have a passion for the garden like me, so she's
always by my side pulling out weeds and identifying plants.
It's great for us to be able to connect in that way together as well.
– It's fine in here, I like it. – Yeah we'll do this one eh? – Yep.
We sort of realised that just us doing what we did kind of wasn't enough.
The issue was bigger than what we thought it was.
Now our steps are to just kind of make all of that knowledge that we've accumulated along the way available for other fishers.
So we're on a bit of a path at the moment, we've applied for some funding to set up infrastructure
for different regions around New Zealand so that the fishers in those regions can then feed their communities.
[Music]
There's only a handful of artisanal fishers left so, you know, what we're trying to achieve
at the moment is empowering those small-scale fishers who want to feed their communities.
We make it really really easy, we've taken all of that hard work out of it: the infrastructure
will be built down here in Southland, the ice- making machines and stuff like that all goes
with the chiller unit, we pack our fish in zero degrees to minimise the chance of bacteria.
These units will show up in your region, they've got quota with them so you don't have to go
out and outsource quota, you basically just have to have a registered fishing vessel and
a QRN number and you can go to sea and catch a small amount of fish, put it up on our ordering
platform and by the time you dock your boat and tie up, the money's in your bank.
This is about giving the power back to the harvesters, letting them tell their story as
individuals, so not smothering them and saying, oh they fish for Gravity or whatever.
Everybody who chooses to adopt this method and use this packing facility, it still remains their own
separate entity; it's not about franchising and going big or go home, it's about empowering
lots of little communities and lots of little businesses to shine their own light, you know,
to pedal their own waka.
– Here it is. – Yes!
I've been asked over the years, Mish where can we buy some paua, where can we get some kina?
And to be quite honest I've not known the answer to that, you know, it's just like
well, you should be able to go to the market and get it.
Jump on board, Nate. Nate's going to get all the paua today.
All the way from the South Island to show us how it's done!
We've started to explore the options and opportunities, how we can do that.
And then entered Nate: here's the opportunity, we want to do this, are you interested?
and it was just like shit yeah, we're interested, man.
At Sealective we're actually just harvesting three species at the moment, which is the butterfish
– that's hand-speared and it's all breath-hold as well – and then you've got the paua,
and then the kina.
Good work, cuzzie!
Kina!
When we first started this we were unsure if we were going to get the funding approved or not.
So I'm pretty happy to say that we we have actually secured the funding through SFFF and MPI.
In the North Island we've got Mish, who's taken it on board.
He's been absolutely epic to deal with. His enthusiasm and energy about the whole thing is mammoth.
He's been in this industry for a really long time.
To get the physical infrastructure here and to, you know, get sort of phone calls and messages
from Mish saying, you know, well it's here, man, it's happening, was just, you know,
another level of confidence for me moving forward with this thing.
I believe with everything within me that this is the right way to go about it, by scaling
everything back and creating lots of little job opportunities for people.
When you on-sell that, you might be able to sell it to somebody else down the road who fillets it or they might
smoke it, somebody might can it or bottle it or pickle it; the possibilities are endless.
There's some beautiful fish here. Just straight on the ice, ah? Yeah please.
This thing has to be led from this way of thinking, for people who are deeply connected with the kaimoana and the
environment, the people that want to give back and protect and preserve it for future generations.
As opposed to just extract and get your money and go home at the end of the week.
What Nate's doing and what MPI are doing right now, they're giving us the
opportunity to be able to actually roll with all the big dogs and set up without all of
these huge hurdles. They're making the opportunity a lot more practical and that's what needs
to happen because there are so many young cats out there, so many capable people that
are a hundred percent able to do what we do but it's just the red tape and the financial cost, the financial burden.
I've got a couple of orders that have got butterfish and paua,
so what I have to do is measure and then weigh each individual fish.
Forty.
Now we've got this platform through Nate that he's rolling out with MPI
that we can actually get it out to the consumers. It can be received by New Zealanders, in New Zealand.
My vision for this thing is to give the fish back to the people.
When I say people I mean the five million people that live here in New Zealand.
For so long it's been shipped offshore. My intention was to restore Regional Community Access.
This is what we once had – there was little fishing ports all over this whole country.
And that's, you know, been lost over the years because of the way the system's geared.
Harvest!
Best case scenario is we can prove not just to, you know, our regulators here in New Zealand
but to the rest of the world that what we're doing is more sustainable and more ethical
than kind of anything that's come to pass.
It's creating job opportunity right across the whole spectrum and returning a beautiful food resource back to the community.
Not shipping it offshore. And getting people to understand that it's a precious resource
that needs looking after.