In the Net with Barton, Cockwell and Wallace

Interview by Lee Hazell (LH) FIBS

LH: Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of "Caught In The Net." Recently, Director of Fisheries, John Barton (JB), Councillor Richard Cockwell (RC) and Stuart Wallace (SW) of Fortuna Ltd. Visited Alaska to have a look at the port development and fish plants there. Firstly I asked them why Alaska? And, what were the main aims of the trip?

JB: We’d been invited to go there by Nippon Suisan Kaisha Ltd., who are a Japanese company who are partners of Fortuna here in the Falklands. They catch quite a lot of fish here n the Falklands but they also have a big operation up in Dutch Harbour in Alaska in the Aleutians. The Island is about 800 miles from Anchorage. The distance is similar as South Georgia is from here. And, I think the interest t them in showing what goes on there and for us, was really that it was an extremely isolated area. It has a very small population but it does have a big fishery and a big onshore operation. They invited us to go and see that as they thought it might be relevant to developments that could happen in the Falklands. It was very much so because a number of us had been to places like Vigo in Spain and Kaohsiung, in the Far East and places like that where there are huge port developments and huge cities and lots of people and lots of development going on. But this was in an area that was rather similar to the Falklands. The sites we were looking at could have been anywhere on East or West Falkland. The population is of a similar sort of order. They have, we were told, a permanent resident population of 4500. Certainly in the fish factories there they use a lot of people that come in to work in those factories during the peak season.

LH: What sore of concept did you bring back? What sort of ideas did you bring back?

RC: I found it particularly interesting. We spent a whole day talking with the City Council , who are obviously responsible for the development work outside that of the actual fishing companies themselves. And, we were looking at how they developed their deep water facility, the technologies they used and the way they approached things. And it was very interesting for me in particular because I had never been to a place where they started from scratch and seen how they actually approached it. I personally found some very interesting ideas – pretty simple technology – not as possibly high tech as we have been envisaging here for the Falklands. And, I believe that we can find ways of having port facilities at a lower cost than we initially had been advised. There is a lot of work to be done before we do that. The concept, as far as I could see is a lot simpler than what we were talking about.

LH: There still has to be lots and lots of planning to do and design work and..

RC: A huge amount. I mean, basically a huge amount of work has to go into it but they have got a very ‘can do’ attitude there. There’s no doubt about it, the Alaskan cities are very attuned to the needs of the fishing industry and they work very well together. They have environmentally backed studies and that sort of thing but really, they want to build and they want to get on with it.

LH: There are quite a lot of similarities, probably for people here, if something needs doing then…

RC: they are a very practical sort of people. If something goes wrong, they are 800 miles away from a larger source of supply so they sort it out themselves. I thought their technology to the sort that we could apply for ourselves.

LH: We are looking at a photograph here of one of the fish factories. Can you imagine the Falklands having something like this in the future? Do you think there’s enough coming in, Stuart?

SW: I always have done. I’ve always felt that the long-term future of the Falklands will be with a certain level of fish processing and landing fish onshore and shipping them out to the markets f the world from the Falklands. For me, the trip was interesting in many ways but possibly most of all was seeing how just such an operation does work. Of course, it’s taken many years – 15 or 20 to build up to the major fishing base that you see – but we would have to start much smaller. But it was encouraging to see how it can be done, given the will – political will – is very important, working together as Richard has just said. The administrators of the city and the fishing industry – it’s just a complex and costly operation. But clearly if you could do it there, you could do it here.

JB: I think it’s worth emphasising probably that it’s a very different fishery. I mean, they have this huge resource right on their doorstep. They are fishing for something called Alaskan Pollack and it’s a mega resource. The TAC is something like 1.2 million tonnes so it’s much greater than anything we’ve got here. Anything that comes anywhere near that is something like krill around South Georgia. It’s quite a different fishery. Having said that, the amounts that have been landed through Dutch Harbour do equate to the entire volume of landings or catches which are taken in the Falklands. So, there is some similarity in the figures. It’s a very different fishery in that they are largely dealing with a single species which lends itself to certain things. I think that before we had gone to Dutch Harbour we were all conferencing London on value added seafood products and that sort of thing so the two things came together. While Dutch Harbour is similar n many ways – isolated, geography is similar, climate is similar – that sort of thing – there were some differences.. But I think the key thing that came out of it for me was that if we wanted t do something like that, as long as the financial figures came out of it right, and we really wanted to do something like that then I don’t think we saw anything that would be a complete show stopper. If you wanted to do it then you could do that somewhere in the Falklands. If we wanted that sort of level of fishing industry here in the Falklands, then, what we saw there – there would be a lot of problems in creating that would preclude that sort of development from happening. I think that was a key thing. There was a lot of things there – medium level technology. It’s nothing, really, that couldn’t be made to work here. There would have to be a lot of analysis in the finances and that sort of thing, if you wanted to go down that road, I think it did illustrate how things could develop here.

LH: Did you sort of get any signs of there being conflict with the local people and the fishing industry itself, or does everything seem to work in..

RC: I think to really assess that, because there were local people (Inuit) working in the fish factories. There were issues about their traditional grounds around the harbour and there was a discussion about whether there should be another small boat harbour built somewhere. Obviously there were some differences of opinion but nothing which created any hostility. On the whole, the (Inuit) are integrated into the fishing industry.

SW: From what I heard, it seemed fine. The relationship seemed ok. Clearly, as Richard said, there were one or two issues that were subject to discussions. The small boat harbour was the main one that we saw. They were going to have a referendum about that on the day we left, I think. The administrators that we saw were very aware that the community depended upon the fishing industry and upon the fishing industry operating from Dutch Harbour. There were other Islands – other fishing bases – around but they wanted to make sure that they had the business.

RC: I think there were wide discussions on various issues but I think that is an indication of a healthy community that they can actually speak up for their traditional places and methods. They were allowed to speak up and it wasn’t as if the industry just took over. I thought that was a sign of a healthy community.

JB: I think the fishing industry is fairly integrated. The fish plant that we went around had their own electricity generating capacity. In fact, they had more capacity than they needed. They were sending power to a near-by city. There were things we saw there that were quite useful to some of our debates that we have been having. We saw an awful lot of dock facilities there. It was a bit unclear when we were there – they were actually having some rather good weather and they were saying that it was not always like this. We never really saw what sort of swell levels or wave levels it could get to there. But they did assure us that it did get quite rough at times. Certainly they had a lot of docks there which had big trawlers alongside and they had some of the reefers that we occasionally see in Berkley Sound there transhipping fish as well. Certainly whilst they had some very good dock facilities, they also had a range of facilities and some of them were just for laying up some of the trawlers. They certainly weren’t engineered to the extent that we have been contemplating in some of our port developments and they were certainly doing things at a lower cost. One of the other interesting things that Richard mentioned this morning – another presentation that we had was that we’ve gone off and said we couldn’t do something in a certain place as the ground goes up too steeply behind the area or something like that. It was very noticeable in Dutch Harbour that they build things just on the water’s edge and the topography and terrain just behind the factory can go vertical and is much steeper than anything we have got in the Falklands.

RC: They use it to fill the ground in to make the harbour.

LH: That’s right because they are pretty steep slopes, aren’t they?

RC: In some ways I thought the topography was a bit like South Georgia moved up to a warmer place and the snow and the glaciers had disappeared. It’s got very steep sided hills and the airstrip was extremely interesting. I don’t know how long it was and it was a bit like landing on an aircraft carrier in a 737. Certainly, it’s amazing what they have done there and they have the ‘can do’ attitude there which I think is something we could copy from. The other interesting thing was in our discussions with the authorities – they were talking about what the Falklands were like and I had some copies of the Island Plan and they were really interested, particularly the Island Plan. They thought it was the most wonderful document they had seen for years. And, they have asked for a lot ore details on how we produced it and they want to see the full coverage. So, it wasn’t all one way. Hopefully one day someone might come down here and see what we are doing.

LH: Was there anything else from just around the island itself that you found interesting? Like wildlife. What sore of wildlife do they have there?

SW: They have American Bald Eagles. We saw one in the distance. Apparently there are lots there and at certain times of the year the birds perch all over the trawlers which are in the harbour. We saw one or two, I think.

RC: I saw two

SW: That was something I didn’t know about the Aleutians. I thought I knew a great deal about the Aleutians before.

JB: I think the other thing in general away from fishing that we did find interesting is that the hotel we stayed in was fairly large and that had been built by Nissui and was still owned by them. Flanking that hotel were two enormous supermarkets and they really were large. And, they had a huge product range – deli counters, fresh bread, meats, all sorts f things. Believe it or not, they had some things that were just slightly out of date as well. They are coping with all the problems, which we have here like distances and supplies and that sort of thing, which we obviously have here. It was slightly difficult to see how these supermarkets did operate because we went around to both of them and we were the only people wandering around. It seemed to be indicated that a lot of times the fishing trawlers undertook major re-supplies. That’s perhaps what kept them going. Even though they had double the population of the Falklands, we couldn’t immediately see how these two enormous supermarkets managed to survive and apparently there was another supermarket somewhere else which we didn’t go in but they were there with huge product lines and, again, perhaps it was the fishing vessels which kept those going.

LH: So, there must be quite a few fishing vessels there?

RC: A lot of small vessels. They are not freezer-trawlers (stern freezers). They come in about every five days and pump all the fish ashore and go off again and they continue to-ing and frow-ing with smaller, very powerful boats. They go back to the supermarkets. They were at least twice the size of the West Store. They were huge big things. I was told by one of the people that people shopped in the evenings rather than in the day. That was the only explanation I could get for the numbers during the day. And, no alcohol in the supermarkets.

SW Another thing which struck me was the communications that the industry made possible. There were two flights a day in, which is a two-hour flight from Anchorage. In fact, I think, there are three on Sundays. Clearly, there are a lot of reefers coming in and container vessels in and out. A lot of business, and even travel agents were making loads of money.

JB: That’s all based on fisheries.

SW: Based on fisheries.

JB: I’m not quite sure what the land area of the two islands were but they didn’t seem to be producing much for that area itself. It was more based on the fish that was moving. And, again, whilst they had – no matter which way you looked, really – you were sitting on the plane and looking out the window and you could see reefers offshore. You could look out your hotel window and you could see reefers. But apart from the refrigerated freezer vessels, much as we have in Berkley Sound, they also had a lot of containers moving. Wherever you looked, there were both dry containers and reefer containers lurking around the place. Certainly while we were there, there was a huge reefer – container vessel that was picking up all these containers. So, they had a lot of containers moving backwards and forwards. Again, I think the volumes of fish products moving enabled them to do that and allowed them to re-supply these supermarkets and that sort of thing. They are in a very isolated area but they still had these big ships moving in and out.

RC: That was a scale. I can’t see how we could achieve that scale but it showed what was possible and that they get container vessels that are as bit as any that we’ve seen anywhere in the world, I would have thought. They were huge.

LH: Do they have like a seasonal fishing like we have here?

JB: It is seasonal. I think it runs at a high level for a longer portion of the year. The Pollack season is divided into two seasons. So, there are times when a lot of the transient workers fly out and they go down to a very low level of operation and then, they get them all back. The factory we were looking around, I think, had maybe 300 staff when we were looking around it, whereas, at the height of the season, it is up to about 1200. Even while we were there, the operation was 24 hours a day. So, it is seasonal and, again, they are only dealing with one species. If you were doing the same thing here, you would have to deal with a mix of species. When one species wasn’t around, you would tend to do something else. That’s what they do a bit as well. But the Pollack resource is the main-stay of what they do.

RC: They have the King Crab trade which is a very short burst and very intensive. It is five days that they catch King Crabs. Everywhere around the island you saw crab pots piled up and they were converting the trawlers over to crabbers while we were there. And the intensity of the fishery while that is going on must be amazing.

LH: Finally, who funded the trip?

SW: Nippon Suisan Kaisha.

LH: It was an invitation?

SW: Yes.

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