What was I thinking? Why did I propose going out on a spot prawn fishing boat?
I’ve barfed on a gentle train trip from Toronto to Mississauga, on a winding road in Maui, on a flight just after lifting off and resorted to a Gravol-induced coma on a sailboat excursion.
But then again, not long ago, I spent two unmedicated days on the Mekong River travelling from Thailand to Laos on an open boat aromatized with diesel fumes with no ill effects; that was the faint hope clause in my thinking.
“Warning,” said Steve Johanssen, who with fishing partner Frank Keitsch operates Organic Ocean. “There’s no bathroom aboard. The guys have the ocean but there’s nowhere for women.” Double jeopardy!
As it turned out, spot prawn fishing is fun! No gagging sideshows were involved.
My job was to stand around and be useless and underfoot as they harvested spot prawns and laid down traps. The Sun’s excellent and energetic videographer Mark Yuen meanwhile ambushed them from every angle and strapped cameras on their chests and there were two other visitors on board the boat. Johanssen and Keitsch took it all in stride.
Fisherguys, as Johanssen will tell you, are liars.
“We lie to all fishermen and they lie to us. We protect our spots,” he says when I ask where the prawns hang out. I’ll tell you this. The first of their six trap lines (with 50 cages each) is at Suzuki Bay which they named after the famous David Suzuki; he was on board when they first fished there. The spot prawn fishery is one of the most sustainable off the coast of B.C., so Suzuki’s a fan.
As for Organic Ocean’s daily haul during spot prawn season, they’re equally cagey. “Hundreds of pounds is all we’ll say,” says Johanssen. He and Keitsch are second generation fishers. They resemble Teletubbies in their loose rubbery bright orange and bright yellow fishing gear. I fit right into the cartoon with my lime green Gore-Tex jacket.
“We’re like an old married couple,” says Johanssen. “We’ve been fishing together for 35 years.” They also fish for tuna, salmon, halibut, black cod and ling cod. Spot prawn season opened May 13 and typically lasts six to eight weeks.
“We’re the envy of a lot of guys because this boat was designed for spot prawns. It’s simple, roomy and wide,” says Keitsch. It clocks 40 kilometres per hour whereas their salmon and halibut boat crawls at 11 km/h.
At the first trap line, deckhand Peter Chauvel sends a hose 30 metres down into the ocean to pump salt water into the hatch. There’s too much fresh water at the surface. Then they haul up the marker buoy and anchor and follow the line to retrieve the cages they’d set the previous day. The prawns are wriggling and discombobulated at the startling turn of events. One moment they’re eating tuna meal 90 metres down (according to the depth sounder) and the next, they’re hauled out of their universe and looking at Johanssen who dumps them into baskets and drops them into the hatch. Bycatch are similarly shocked. A spot prawn drops from the maw of a kelp-green ling cod and another from the slippery folds of an octopus.
These prawns will be sold off the boat that day at the False Creek Fisherman’s Wharf and to some of the 30-plus chefs who buy from Organic Ocean.
As part of the sustainable fisheries practice, the Department of Fisheries monitors every move, recording time limits, catch quotas, male to female ratios partly through fishermen input and partly through GPS monitoring. Observers go aboard once a week.
There are some 250 spot prawn licences on the West Coast with some boats accounting for more than one licence, says Johanssen. The only wild prawns in the world are found in waters off California and B.C. up to the Alaskan border, he says.
“The rest are farmed.”
At one time, 90 per cent of the spot prawn catch went to world markets and locals knew little about them.
“People thought tiger prawns were local,” says Johanssen. (Tiger prawn aquaculture in south east Asia has been associated with environmental degradation, disease, pollution, abuse of child labour and violence.)
Eight years ago, Johanssen, Robert Clark (the chef at C seafood restaurant at the time) and the Chefs’ Table Society launched the Spot Prawn Festival to showcase the beautiful local crustaceans.
“Rob had come out fishing with me and he said ‘I want these prawns.’ I told him he’d have trouble getting them,” says Johanssen. And that’s when plans were hatched to create a demand at home. About 300 people showed up to the first Spot Prawn Festival. This year, 3,000 showed up.
“Now every prawn we catch stays in B.C.,” says Johanssen. “Chefs can truthfully say the spot prawns were in the ocean five, six hours before they serve them.” Worldwide demand for these gorgeous prawns, however, is driving prices up. I see them in retail stores for about $18 a pound this year. (Organic Ocean sells them for $15 a pound at the wharf.) Eight years ago, they sold for an average $12 a pound and I scored some at T & T supermarket for $7 a pound.
The boys have pulled up all the traps off the first line and Chauvel had been baiting each cage as it was emptied. Now they’ll ready to return them to the ocean for the next day’s catch. Keitsch drops an anchor and places a buoy with the first cage (they also track the cages by computer as other boats might rip the buoy off). Keitsch hooks and drops 49 more cages as Johanssen steers the boat.
“Notice how Steve’s winding back and forth?” Keitsch says. “He’s trying to find where the prawns live (using the depth sounder).”
He marks the last trap, drops an anchor and it’s time to move on to another line of traps. But not before they unload the extra cargo. Yuen and I are dropped off at Horseshoe Bay and they’re off to deal with five more spot prawn lines before going to market.
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