For all the happy stories coming out of this year’s unexpected sockeye boom, fishermen with traditional commercial contracts with the big buyers and processors are getting all of $1.50 per pound for sockeye that’s still selling for $6 per pound and up at retail outlets.
Skipper Otto, as retired Kelowna high-school chemistry teacher and longtime fisherman Otto Strubel is known online (www.wildbcsalmon.org), is in a little commercial tributary that has the potential to change a lot of that. He and his family have set up Canada’s first community-supported fishery (CSF), modelled on community-supported agriculture, where end customers pay up front for fresh local food and pick up weekly boxes of whatever they’ve ordered.
In Strubel’s case, he now has 200 members who each put up $250 before the season starts in return for 35 pounds of “whole, cleaned, head-on sockeye or the equivalent value in other species of salmon.” That’s about seven whole sockeye at $7 a pound. If Strubel doesn’t catch a thing, members will get $150 back.
In the year since this has been going, Strubel’s revenue from a bin of fish has risen to $4,000 from $1,200. But the sweetest benefit has been getting $50,000 in his pocket before the season opens. No more maxing out his line of credit. Since he based the number of members on the number of sockeye he is certain he can always catch, that’s real money in the bank.
On Labour Day, his members showed up at the False Creek dock by Granville Island to pick up their orders.
“They pick what they want,” said Strubel’s daughter-in-law Sonia, whose husband Shaun, also a high-school teacher, has been fishing with his dad since he was seven.
“We throw it on a scale and subtract the total from $250 on the spreadsheet.”
Sonia’s role, finally paying her a small salary, is critical: she keeps the accounts, tracks orders and keeps communications flowing.
She does this – and most everything else enabling this model to work – through the miracle of free social media. Customers – and media – have been attracted through online connections to the website. Sonia, with the help of Farm Folk/City Folk (www.ffcf.bc.ca), set it up through Google, then traded maintenance to a webmaster for fish.
The webmaster set her up on Twitter (“September 1: El Dorado [Otto’s 35-foot gillnetter] is on her way down the coast with a tonne of fish on board!”). She sends weekly emails to her members to let them know about the week’s delivery, then books their pickup appointments using www.eventbrite.com.
Meanwhile, Shaun engages customers with blogs from the boat: “August 18: Otto had a great first 24 hours of fishing and pulled in over 300 sockeye. Unfortunately, he also caught the net in the prop. … He had to sell off some of his fish to a local buyer because the holds were full and he was out on the fishing grounds with no way to get the fish to Vancouver!”
Otto admits that even with the CSF covering his costs and delivering a small profit, the shortage of fishing openings means he can’t make a living from fishing.
He says in the north, where he fishes Skeena and Nass river runs up to the Alaska border, “most of us are old, semi-retired, just hanging on and hoping to qualify for employment insurance.”
But he agrees that the CSF “could turn it around for some of us, although not for the whole industry.”
Already he has been able to bring his old fishing partner Terry Mooney’s catch into his CSF. Tuna and halibut fishermen who have heard about the CSF on the docks want to get involved, which would tap into customers waiting in line for memberships. Fishermen on the east coast are copying the model.
It’s a strange mix: hunting and gathering and social media. And it’s working.