| 3 AQUACULTURE » Waimana Marine Hands-on mussel farming business Simon Pooley has two boats and a team of 12 taking care of Waimana Marine’s mussels alongside all the other mussel farms they contract out to. Virginia Wright The name for the company Simon Pooley runs out of Elaine Bay in Pelorus Sound is Waimana Marine, named after one of his grandfather’s boats. The Pooley family have been continuously operating out of Elaine Bay since the early 80’s when Simon Pooley’s father Rob arrived from North Canterbury to start a small hands-on mussel farming business. Simon was four, his younger brother Jeremy was two. 40 years later as a result of some serious succession planning the family have a presence in both places. Jeremy has taken over the family crayfish quota that Rob left behind when he came north, and Simon has taken over the mussel farming business. “I looked after Dad’s business for 15 years as a crop farming business, farming mussels and selling the crop. Since I’ve taken over the business we’ve diversified and now we’re more like a third servicing, a third contract harvesting and a third spat production. We’re harvesting about 4000 tons a year which includes our own crop,” says Simon. With an average cycle time of 21 months there is a routine to Waimana Marine’s activities, although not an annual or seasonal routine as it might be for those farming the land. As the mussels ‘come fat’ they’re harvested, along with the crop or culture ropes they grow on, leaving the anchor and backbone ropes that provide the structure for the continuous loops of growing mussels, in place. The culture rope is then brought in as soon as possible to be serviced and replaced ready for the next crop of spat which will become plump, juicy mussels in their turn, ready for eating and export 21 months later. “The crop rope comes aboard as the mussels come aboard. The mussels go one way and the rope goes the other way as we harvest. Then the mussels go off to the factory and the crop rope goes off to the yard where it gets reconditioned, then redeployed when we re-seed,” says Simon. It’s a deceptively simple explanation for the process back at the yard that requires some serious machinery to handle the 2000 or so metres of heavy, dirty, ‘fluffy Christmas tree rope’ as it comes out of its 1.6 metre-high bag to go over a wheel for stripping and reconditioning, before it can be reseeded. Back on the boat another ingenious piece of machinery means the rope goes back into the water complete with spat, held temporarily in place by biodegradable cotton. The rope is deployed through a PVC tube lined with the cotton stocking and comes out looking like a sausage with the emerging rope now covered in the spat which is covered in the cotton stocking, which holds it in place. ‘Obviously the mussels can’t hold on to the rope by themselves but they re-attach over the first couple of days and the cotton dissolves at the same time,” says Simon. From the other side of the boat at harvest time, the bags now holding up to a ton of mussels, are delivered to the wharf in loads calculated to fill a truck and trailer: a minimum load of 24 tons, and preferably a load of 48 tons making two full loads of mussels ready for processing whether for the food industry or nutraceutical sector. It’s the same work that the Pooley family have been doing since Rob Pooley first began, but now instead of a staff of six, with one boat growing, servicing and harvesting their own crop of around 2000 tons of mussels, they have two boats and a team of 12 taking care of Waimana Marine’s mussels alongside all the other mussel farms they contract out to. To further complicate, or perhaps simplify, things depending on your point of view, Waimana Marine’s crop now belongs to a third party who came along just as the succession planning was getting underway. As Simon says, everything looks the same from the outside, but in reality: Rob Pooley remains the landlord, leasing the water space to Waimana Marine with the long term passive income that generates; while Simon farms the Waimana Marine mussels for a third party, alongside all the contracting he does for others, and including his own mussel lines growing around 500 tons of crop in amongst it all. From Simon’s point of view it’s a win-win for all concerned and he encourages everyone to get creative and take their time with succession planning. “It can be very challenging and very complex with lots of boxes to tick, including the legacy box, which is why you might not want to cash it all up to split it,” he says. It took four years for the Pooley family to work their way through the various ramifications to get to where they are now: with an agreement where there is something in it for everyone, including the potential for future generations to get involved if that’s what they want to do. 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