Fishing and fishermen

San Aspiring and San Aotea

New Zealand has a particularly close association with the ocean.  The Polynesians, when they first arrived from the eastern Pacific, found a lush land that was strangely short of food plants, but was surrounded by a most bounteous pantry of a sea.  And so it has continued -- unsurprisingly, when satellite images of the country are considered.  Basically, Aotearoa is a thin string of islands, surrounded by a terrific lot of water.

Which meant that it did come as a surprise to find that New Zealand's biggest fishing enterprise, Sanford, has a trawler in the South Georgia Sea, a long way south of Cape Horn.  The ship, San Aspiring, has been fishing for toothfish there since February, and, as Radio NZ reported, 15 of the crew need to get home.  And so a sister ship, San Aotea, is forging through the frigid Southern Ocean on a rescue mission.

These fishermen have not been exposed to Covid-19 at all, and the idea is that they should stay that way.  Sanford spokesperson Fiona MacMillan said with no flights from South America or any way to get the crew home without potentially exposing them to Covid-19 in transit they decided the best option was to just go and get them.

"It's the right thing to do. Those guys did not sign up to be stuck out at sea for eight months, they signed up for a specific fishing mission."

The two ships will meet up near the Falkland Islands in a couple of weeks, the two crews will change places, and the seafarers who had been on San Aspiring should be home by July.

Sanford, as well as having one of the prettiest website home pages I have ever seen, has a very interesting history.  The company's founder, Albert Sanford, arrived in New Zealand on New Year's Day, 1864, and within a year was fishing from his first boat, an ex-pilot cutter named Foam.  He smoked the snapper he caught by burning kauri offcuts, creating a product that was soon very popular in the Auckland market.   By 1881 he had his own store, and launched a downtown fish market in 1894.  Another ten years, and a limited liability company had been established.  Sanford was a name becoming known throughout New Zealand.

An operation that had started with just one cutter had blossomed into a fleet, and the single market had become just one of 15 shops.  The Great Depression stalled progress for a bit, and Sanford trawlers were requisitioned by the government during World War Two.  Then regulation of the sea meant that all fishing vessels had to be licensed.  Sanford NZ, however, persevered, and flourished, partly by means of buying up other companies' licences, and partly by selling shares on the stock exchange.  Overseas markets beckoned, particularly in Australia and Japan. Then, in the 1980s, the company began to invest in aquaculture, farming oysters, first, and then mussels, the green-lipped mussel being a particularly successful venture.

And then there is the Antarctic toothfish, the catch that has stranded 15 fishermen who need to get back to New Zealand.  The ground is the sea about South Georgia, and the fishing is only done there in the southern summer months -- and winter has come.  Hence the rescue mission. 

Back home, meantime, the company has opened a new fish market in Auckland -- complete with nine seafood restaurants, and a pub called, somewhat bizarrely, "The Wreck."