FAQ LP

We’re adding new pick-up locations and growing all the time! I think we have something like 90 pick-up locations now between Victoria and Ottawa! If you live in Metro Vancouver, you can pick up directly from us here at the False Creek Fishermen’s Wharf.

And whether you live in Metro Vancouver or across the country, we’ll ship your order to a Community Partner which is usually a grocery store, butcher shop, or brewery in your community. You just go in anytime during the pick-up window and collect your order.

Skipper Otto is a completely different way to get your seafood. In a Community Supported Fishery you get to connect directly and very personally with a small group of harvesters. You commit upfront to eat with the ecosystem, and that means our 40 fishing families know they have a guaranteed fair market for whatever they catch that year. And you have the guarantee that you’ll know exactly what your dollars are supporting.

Every piece of seafood comes with a label that shows you who caught it, when, where, and how, and a little bit about them. Pretty much every other seafood delivery company and retailer is buying most, or all of their seafood from the same industrial seafood supply chain. They’re chasing the same few, sought-after products and paying the lowest price they can and charging you as much as they can.

Skipper Otto is all about protecting a traditional fishing way of life in our coastal communities. We’re about protecting our marine ecosystems. And we’re doing this for food security, and to build robust local domestic food systems. So when you buy a Skipper Otto membership, you’re voting with your dollars for a different kind of food system. A local, robust, resilient, equitable food system.

I love this question! A lot of people have this misconception that “Fresh” seafood is better than frozen seafood, and that’s just not true. Freezing technology today is amazing. If you flash-freeze seafood at sea the day it was caught, or on shore right away when it’s landed, you literally preserve it’s catch-day freshness so that when you thaw it in your fridge or a sink of cold water, it’s immaculate. Unlike when it’s “fresh.”

Boats can be at sea for days or even weeks keeping fish on ice. Then it goes through auctions and distributors for days or weeks on its way to you. And there’s a huge amount of fossil fuels spent in rushing that fish around the globe on airplanes and in ships to try to get it to you fast. So called “fresh” seafood in the grocery store is often 14 days old by the time you get it! And that’s what causes that “fishy” smell. You’re never going to get that “fishiness” with our fish because it’s flash-frozen at sea, or right when it’s offloaded. You’ll have a freezer full of beautiful seafood that you can pull out just an hour before dinner, pop into a sink of cold water to thaw while you prep the rest of the meal, and bingo, fast, fresh meals on the table in no time.

Most people have no idea how much seafood they eat in a year when they first join, and that’s okay! We’re here to help! We have a share-size calculator to help you decide what’s the minimum share size you’ll need for your family and how often you like to eat seafood. And if you don’t buy a big enough share at the start, that’s no problem. You can top up you share in $100 increments later on.

We do just ask you to use up your credits by December of that year. Because we fish specifically for the amount of seafood our members have pre-purchased and we don’t carry inventory over year-to-year.

We’re proud that our prices are pretty comparable to what you’d pay elsewhere for a similar high-quality product. But way more of the price you pay goes into the hands of the harvesters than in a typical fish-buying situation. And keep in mind that you can pick and choose whatever you want. So if some of the typically more high-priced products like spot-prawns and halibut are out of your price range, that’s no problem.

You can pick lower-priced items like chum salmon and hake and get amazing value for your dollar. You pay a small membership fee to help us offset our administrative costs – and that slides from $19 to $29 depending how early or late in the sign-up season you join.

You can sign up on our website here. But hurry – sign-up closes May 31st and you don’t want to miss out on the season that’s getting underway right now!

Let us know your thoughts — what do people who are thinking about joining need to know to convince them to give Skipper Otto a try this year?