We love our members because you are the reason small fisherman like us keep on fishing for sustainable seafood. It is very difficult to not only sell your fish, but also to transport and process it if you’re not a big business.

After Otto and the gang catch your fish, they take them to a North Coast offload site where the fish are gutted, cleaned, and belly iced before being trucked down in bins to a fish plant in Richmond. In a recent post we mentioned how these offload sites are owned by big businesses who charge anyone not selling fish directly to them an unloading fee of  several hundred dollars plus a tax per fish.

Most of the big companies automatically de-head all the fish that come through and won’t make an exception for small-scale fisherman. This is why your fish have been headless recently. For those of you who love fish head soup, we’re working on tracking down an offloading site that will leave the heads on. Hopefully we’ll have you eating lots of delicious fish head soup soon 🙂

We are too small to be booking a whole truck ourselves each week so our bins piggy back on a big company’s truck.  Our bins could end up on a truck that is heading to any huge number of different facilities — cold storage places, processors, trucking yards, etc.  This means our fish end up in a different place each week, and we have no way of knowing where our fish is going ahead of time. We eventually get a call or email from the trucker or the trucking company to say where the fish will be delivered.

This makes it hard for us to predict when fish will arrive and when to schedule fresh fish pickups. We wish we could always give several days notice, but in reality we are given very little notice of when and where our fish will arrive. Shaun is currently waiting to hear when and where the fresh fish Otto caught on Wednesday will arrive. We are looking forward to holding a fresh fish pick-up ASAP.