About the Crail Bay Salmon farm
Crail Bay is in the Pelorus sound, about 4 hours drive from Blenheim.
The salmon farm I worked on was owned by New Zealand Marine farms Ltd. There were two rows of floating platforms, anchored to concrete blocks on the sea bed. The cage frames were floated on mussel boys, nets were suspended inside the frames. We travelled to and from the farm, which was 100m or so from the shore, in flat bottomed aluminium dinghies that were especially designed to tie on to the front of the salmon cages to push them around.
The sea cages had to be kept clean, which involved tying a second cage onto the dirty one, the nets were stitched together and weighted and the salmon were herded from one net into the other. The full cage was pulled out and tied off, the net on the empty cage was pulled up out of the water and taken away for waterblasting. The full cage was then tied into the platform. Moving full cages was quite challenging at times. In order for the nets to hang rather than flow out with the current, each of the 8 corners had a weight tied to it. These weights would sometimes snag on the anchor lines. Sometimes it took both boats to free the net and in the worse cases- a diver. Strong tidal movement and wind also made moving cages difficult at times.
There were six staff employed most of the time. Casuals were brought in to help with harvesting and grading. The staff worked in pairs over 2 shifts. The early shift was from 6am until 2pm, and the late shift was from 10am til 6pm. We worked a roster of 5 days on, 2 days off, 7 days on then 5 days off.
The daily jobs included feeding the fish twice a day- each shift did one feed; changing dirty cages; waterblasting nets and recording what had been done, which cages were changed, any that were marked for mending and how much food was fed out.
Other duties included:
- grading -the smolt grew at different rates so to make it easier for feeding and harvesting, they were fed through a race, scooped out with nets and sorted into cages by approximate size.
- Sampling and counting- the salmon were fed into the race again, random fish were collected and weighed, and the fish counted then released into a cage at the end of the race
- Harvesting- a harvesting cage made of canvas was stitched to the salmon cage. The salmon were herded a few at a time into the harvesting cage and gassed with carbon dioxide. When they stopped thrashing about, they were scooped out, their throats cut and then the salmon were packed in ice. The salmon harvested were often scheduled to be flown out later in the day so harvesting usually occured in the wee small hours of the morning. A truck would arrive, loaded with xactic bins full of ice and would drive the packed bins to the factory.
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| Salmon farm from hill |
Salmon farm showing cages |
NZMF Sign |
Row B with mussel farms in distance |
Salmon farm, Crail Bay |
Wet Inlet, Crail Bay |
The Workers
Of the six staff that worked on the farm, five of us lived in Crail Bay, plus the manager. There were two houses, one was the original homestead and the other more of a large 3 bedroom workers cottage. There were two smaller buildings, one was a two roomed unit, with a door outside being the only access. One side was a shared kitchen/smoko room and the other was just a bedroom- this unit was called the Mohadon. The other was a 3 roomed little cottage (called the house on poo corner). It had a small bedroom, tiny kitchen and a lounge. There was a toilet/laundry/shower block behind the main homestead. The front room of the homestead was set up as an office.
I started in the Mohadon- which meant I was responsible for the kitchen despite not being the only person using it. When the couple living in poo corner moved on, I moved into there.
The sixth worker travelled daily from nearby Waitaria Bay
Crail Bay was too remote a location to get a reliable tv signal so television watching was not included in pastimes. While we were not working, we fished off the salmon farm- catching mostly large snapper. I had my motorbike so would explore nearby bays. Most of the staff would head out of the bay on their 5 days off but there was always house keeping sort of stuff to do and the rest of the time was mostly spent hanging out with the workers in the cottage, drinking tequila and smoking pot.
The turntable was always going and we had turns changing the record.
Groceries were ordered and delivered with the mail to Nopera once a week. The mail boat would also call in but the groceries came via the rural delivery van which also doubled as the school bus.
The salmon food was delivered every Friday via a transport truck driven by "Roger". Roger would also fill our alcohol orders and we would pay on delivery. There was the odd Friday where we could hear the truck making its way up the hill from Nopera. The company ute would be dispatched, Roger relieved of his load of alcohol and everyone would be too drunk to unload the food by the time he arrived. It was almost always an overnighter for him!
There was the odd social gathering at the Waitaria Bay hall and on special occasions we would get dressed up and drive the 2 hours to the Portage Hotel.Sharing the bay
The salmon farmers were not the only residents of Crail Bay. There were the farmers from whom the land and buildings were leased and out in the water, there were sharks. Not the sinister white pointer man eating sharks. Our most common sharks were bronze whalers. It's most likely they were drawn by the smell of the fish that had died. Once they had bitten the net, the whirlpool created by the salmon swimming in circles drew them in and would have been pretty much impossible to escape the current again.
The shark were on average 12 ft long. On one occasion, the shark had swum into the net and turned around several times, becoming tangled in the net. When the "mort sock" was pulled to the surface, we found more than expected. A drowned shark.
My birthday was in the middle of summer and my work mates celebrated by throwing me off the wharf. Later that day, a bronze whaler was found in a salmon cage. A memorable birthday!
The sharks were shot, brought ashore and buried.
What happened to the salmon farm?
When I started on the salmon farm, the staff had regular meetings which I was excluded from until I was promoted to permanent staff. The gist of it was that upon harvesting, there was a huge shortfall in the expected tonnage of salmon and the actual. Were the fish getting stolen? Were they escaping? Getting eating by sharks?
The loss of salmon by whatever means left a huge shortfall in the budget. New Zealand Marine Farms was in financial trouble. Management was blamed so the manager was sacked and the company bought out by Baigent Holdings directed by Kent Baigent.
by the end of my 2nd summer on the salmon farm, I knew exactly what had happened to all the missing fish. The water in Crail Bay was too warm, too many fish in each of the smaller cages, not a lot of tidal flow in summer - it all meant there was not enough oxygen available to the fish and a high bacteria count exacerbated by the dying fish. During the worst of it, any fish that had lost scales through any reason at all was soon covered in red lesions. The amount of dead fish that sank into the "mort sock" at the bottom of the net was only a small percentage of what had actually died.
In order to get a clearer picture of how many salmon had actually been lost, as soon as the water temperature dropped and the oxygen level was above marginal, a random cage of salmon was counted. The final count was only a third of the total that had been originally counted into that cage, less counted mortalities.
The decision was made to find a more suitable location for salmon farming. Somewhere the water temperature was cooler and there was more water movement. An experimental licence was granted to establish a salmon farm in Port Underwood.
Salmon cage
tied onto
dinghy
Changing cages
My motorbike,
salmon farm behind
Feeding on
row B
Harvesting cage
and grading barge
plus nets that
have been pulled
up for cleaning
The Mohadon
The shark that
drowned
Salmon in
grading race
This shark was
shot
view down
row A
Salmon cages
A salmon cage