A wonderful career
Early farmers did things differently but knew the industry would change
ASK a 60-year-old man to reminisce and you may deeply regret it! My career has been a long and lucky one and experience and interesting people have abounded.
It seems like yesterday that I avidly read my first copy of Fish Farmer, left behind on some staff room table. It was a magical magazine then and it still hooks me now.
I came to fish farming through a circuitous route. I had no career plan, like most of the world, and drove my mother to exasperation. In a final fit of desperation she wrote a list of all of the careers she could think of and with a wail in her voice said, ‘Just cross out the ones you don’t want to do!’
I shall not tell you how badly I fared on that one but after passing out from Cirencester studying agriculture (and passing out was not just an educational term there), I heard there was a course in aquaculture in Inverness and suddenly smelt hope on the wind.
In 1979 I started the course that changed my life completely. I was fascinated, enthralled and addicted. The aquaculture you see now was so utterly different then.
I worked on a mussel and oyster farm in Mull, a Dover sole farm (the White Fish Authority’s) in Largs, a rainbow trout farm at Moniack, and a plaice or anything farm at Ardtoe. Imagine that range being available now?
The equipment was basic to say the least. The mussel farmer’s boat was a single skin assault craft which sank at its mooring in every significant blow. The first task of the day was to wade out up to your chest and bale it out. Then we would go back to our digs and change.
Once dry and semi-warm we would go back and sit on a metal seat, on a metal boat and sort inch-long mussels onto a strip to re-hang them. That winter was the famous one when the temperature bottomed out in Oban at -32. So I fast learned the meaning of cold. Yet nothing dampened my enthusiasm.
There was so much to learn and to develop. There was so little written at that time that we had to use our gut instincts about fish all the time. Sometimes we got it catastrophically wrong and sometimes spectacularly right. To give you some of the differences from then to now: Feed hopper sizes: 50kg hung on poles over pens, filled every day by hand. Feed in 25kg bags loaded onto barges and then hand balled onto pens. Pen sizes: 8m with 5m deep nets. Fish numbers in hundreds or low thousands. Boat sizes: 12ft if you’e lucky with a crock outboard on the back. Number of feed types available: Salmon feed. Digestibility (what?) who knows. Smolt: If you haven’t got a hatchery you take what you can get. (40g was big!) Vaccination: Sorry? Never heard of it, against what? Harvest weight: 2-3kg. 4kg is huge. Harvest and packing on farm. When you finish harvest you start packing. Hand strapped boxes. The only thing that was so much better in those days was that when we sold what little fish we had, the market would pay anything and were desperate to get it.
These are just some of the differences but I hope you get the picture. We innovated every day, simply because we had to. We knew then that the industry we were in could not stay as it was.
The people too were very, very different. Whether it be Murdo, the guy who taught me reluctantly to mend nets, an ex-fisherman, who had been on the whaling fleet and had albums of pictures.
Or Charlie, a Glaswegian raconteur who could tell a story for an hour at lunch break (and often more), weaving jokes in and out, and leaving us with sore stomachs as we headed out for the afternoon’s work.
So many amazing, interesting people who had careers before they came to fish farming. I have never forgotten them and never will. There were some less salubrious characters who came and went but this was the way of an industry that could not find specialists as almost none existed.
I will not say that it was the safest environment because it wasn’t. I
remember being in a very small assault craft heading out to the pens with one tonne of feed aboard when a strong breeze got up.
The water started lapping over both sides of the bow and I gave the international signal for ‘in distress’ – which, I am sure you all know, is to raise and lower one’s arms towards the nearest vessel or people. In this case it was a group of pens. I was not encouraged by seeing three members of staff turn and wave back at me, assuming that for some idiotic reason I was waving to say hello.
The boat was awash by the time I got to the pens and there were a few choice words said.
I cannot talk of the son of an owner who fired a rifle from shore at a seal, forgetting the ricochet possibilities, only for the bullet to pass through the steel staff hut at sea, luckily missing everyone inside!
Nor would I ever mention the member of staff who tied the boat on badly and was so afraid of what his manager (me) might say that he rowed himself ashore in a harvest bin and recovered the boat.
I can talk with pride of someone I still call friend, who worked for me for many years (poor chap). He is the only person to directly disobey an order at sea and survive. No one would ever do what he did now.
A towboat had gone adrift from its mooring in a force seven south westerly. I told him that under no circumstances was anyone to try to get from the rocks to the boat. I informed the insurers and drove to the site, only to find the boat on the mooring.
I discovered that a certain person had jumped from the rocks to the boat and put it back onto its mooring. It is not a pleasant task telling someone off but it is even harder when you know that he has done something that foolhardy and that brave. I managed it but could hardly discipline him, though I am sure there are those who will tell me I should have done.
I must also note how I learned to say sorry. We had a young lad start when I worked in Argyll and as the team were prone to practical jokes, I gave them all a lecture about safety at sea and particularly with youngsters.
That evening as everyone came ashore, the first figure was bedrag- gled and soaked to the skin. I pulled in the supervisor and gave him a roasting over what I had said before. He stated that the boy had jumped off the boat, thinking it was in shallow water and went in over his head. A likely story! Only upon checking with all of the staff and the young man himself, it turned out that this was exactly what he had done. So many staff then knew nothing of the sea either. I had to apologise long and hard for judging too quickly.
In the 38 years of my career I have worked with the best of people, learned from so many and enjoyed every minute. So it is my turn to make a confession.
On one farm where I worked, the weekend shift was not paid as it was supposedly included in your weekly wage. As a special treat on a Sunday you were given a cup of coffee after you had done the morning feed, made by the kind wife of the managing director.
One Sunday I tasted my coffee and to my utter astonishment it tasted of brandy! One of the guys in the staffroom said, ‘that must be the boss’s, drink it before he figures it out!’
Scalding my throat, I gulped it down in about 30 seconds, giggling terribly as I did so. Duly the boss thrust his head through the door saying, ‘Has one of you got my coffee?’
Not one laugh was heard as we all replied we had no idea what he was talking about.
Okay, I admit it. Robin, it was me who drank your coffee and can I just say it tasted so much better for it being yours!