| 81 Lee Fish handles about two and a half thousand tonnes of fish a year, with two thirds of that exported. PRODUCTION Lee Fish Fishing is what we do and we’re passionate about catching and delivering quality ish, says second generation commercial isherman, Dave Moore. “We love ishing and it’s a privilege to ish in a natural resource that belongs to the country. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” Dave and his wifeWendy founded Wild Fish (NZ) Ltd, forty years ago as a small artisanal longline ishing operation, with one single ishing vessel. At the time, Dave’s deckhand was 19-year-old Darrin Fabricius. Darrin went onto progress his career with Dave, gaining his skippers ticket, becoming a director in the business and now holds the tiller as Operations Manager. The two experienced ishmen are a good teamwith a focus on quality, consistency and safety. “We progressively built our ishing leet up and now have six little longline ishing vessels running,” says Dave. “For the whole forty years that we’ve been ishing we’ve exclusively supplied Lee Fish with our catch. About three quarters of our catch is snapper, with the balance being whatever else we can catch around that, within the legal size. Our whole ethos has been to catch quality snapper. Because we’re longline, we catch them one at a time on the hook, trying to consistently catch the same Wild Fish (NZ) Ltd amount of snapper every week of the year. Another key driver for us is to catch the ish safely and responsibly. For the last couple of years, we’ve had cameras on all the vessels to demonstrate transparency in what we’re doing around the product.” The Wild Fish Crew use the Japanese Iki Jime technique, a humane method of killing ish instantly. The ish then go into a saltwater brine for an hour, to maintains the ish’s colour and to cool them before being packed in ice, standing on their belly. “Mostly the ish are caught in the morning and unloaded in the afternoon. If we have to go a little further out to catch the ish we might stay out overnight, but it’s always a maximum of two days before unloading, so the ish are always very fresh.” Wild Fish is based in Warkworth, but its six vessels are spread between Tauranga and Mangonui in Northland. “Fish is plentiful,” says Dave. “There’s ish all the way up the coast and we’re good at what we do. You have to give credit to the skippers and the crews for what they do. I always like to think that Wild Fish will be here in another 100 years if we make the right decisions.” admin@wildfishnz.com 021793352 Wild Fish NZ Ltd wildfishnz
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