Icefish were last caught in France’s Southern Ocean territories around Kerguelen more than twenty years ago and the fishery came to an end in 1993 when the mainly Russian and Polish trawlers that fished for it left many of their distant waters fishing grounds, including the French territorial waters around Kerguelen.
Now Yannick Lauri of new fishing venture Copecma, based in La Réunion, has embarked on re-establishing the fishery for icefish, but the problems lie less in catching the fish as in selling it.
He said that there is an abundant resource and a survey carried out before they began fishing indicated the presence of a close to 200,000 tonne biomass there that has not been fished for a quarter of a century, but these fish are smaller than icefish from other regions.
‘There’s an average size of 30cm and a weight of around 150 grammes, while the icefish caught around South Georgia are 35 to 40cm and have an average 200 gramme weight. It’s due to the differences in feed availability, with smaller volumes of krill in Kerguelen waters,’ he said, adding that this is a winter fishery between December and April, and there is an Australian fishery for icefish in Heard and MacDonald Island waters.
Copecma applied for and was granted a 400 tonne quota, and chartered Austral Fisheries multi-purpose fishing vessel Atlas Cove to catch the icefish using its pelagic trawl gear. The initial trip resulted in 190 tonnes of icefish wholefrozen into 12kg blocks, but selling the eight containers of frozen icefish has not proved easy, although part of the catch has been sold.
‘At the moment the market is difficult,’ he admitted. ‘The market for icefish is mainly in Poland and Russia, and the embargo on Russia, plus the economic situation there, complicates everything. It’s a good fish to eat, with a good flavour, but it’s quite a small fish and that makes it less easy to market icefish.’
