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相对于商业捕捞，华人在海边检的数量简直不值一提。
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ ... rg8jo-1226204855430
Old-fashioned cockle harvesting adds a romantic air to a traditional family business
THEY call it the cockle shuffle. One of those local dances that looks a little easier than it really is. And unless you're from the cockle-rich surf coast that skirts South Australia's Coorong, at the mouth of the mighty Murray about two hours' drive from Adelaide, it's also one of those dances that might look a little odd, too, a sort of Neanderthal twist.
But for South Australians on this part of the coast, it is a perfectly normal - seasonal - move to bust. Particularly come November 1, when cockle season begins.
At 45, Darren Hoad reckons he has been doing the cockle shuffle since he was a kid; it was taught him by his old man, Kevin, patriarch of the small business that is Hoad Fisheries.
You put your left foot in, you put your right foot in too, and twist hard. What happens next is the fascinating bit.
"As your feet bury into the wet sand," says Hoad, "and you twist your ankles, they sort of agitate the cockles and loosen up the sand, and when the next wave comes in, you scoop 'em up with the net."
Easy.
What he doesn't say is that it gives you calves and knees an AFL footballer would kill for. And if you're good at it?
"The best I ever did was a tonne in 47 minutes," says Hoad.
He is quick to point out, however, that this is a team sport, the shuffler working with a "bucket boy" who ferries the shellfish back to a truck higher up the beach, the sort of work that puts muscles on your muscles.
For the Hoads, a cockling trip out to the beach from their Hindmarsh Island base on the other side of the lake often involves Darren's two brothers, Matt and Tim: three on nets shuffling and another employee on buckets. This time of year, they're making about four trips a week, harvesting 600-800kg at a time.
In years before quotas, he says, a daily trip, six times each week, would yield two tonnes. This method is how all cockles are harvested in Australia, an environmentally benign practice that is traditional and has proved sustainable. In 2008 the Marine Stewardship Council, headquartered in Britain, certified the fishery as a harvester of golden perch, yellow-eye (Coorong) mullet, mulloway and Goolwa cockles.
For the Hoads, the only machinery involved is in the grading, and even then it's a fairly unsophisticated sort of conveyor belt arrangement that sorts the mediums from the large, mounted on the back of the family's rough, ready and rapidly rusting cockling truck.
It's a remarkably straightforward process. After the shellfish are graded, they're purged in water for 12 hours back at the family's business base on Hindmarsh Island, and that's it. Some stay on site for retail sale; a trip to Hoads is a ritual for residents and visitors to the Goolwa area during summer.
The rest are sold to Safcol or the wholesale fish markets in Melbourne and Sydney.
A small quantity goes to local restaurants such as Aquacaf in Goolwa, but Hoad, a laconic man of the lakes and seas who lives right on the water at Hindmarsh with his wife Michelle and two daughters, his boats on a jetty out front, says he's not all that interested in developing relationships with small customers and restaurants: "We like to keep things pretty simple round here," he says.
But even if you're not good at the cockle shuffle, this is a very good year for pipis, as they are often known, from the Coorong coastline - Australia's richest source of the shellfish and, more than likely, where the cockles you see in NSW, Victoria or SA markets were harvested.
And it's been a while.
Put simply, the health of the cockle population along the rugged, empty beaches on either side of the river's mouth depends on nutrients flushed down the Murray.
Commercial pipi fishers, as they're generally known in South Australia, take their cockles - Donax deltoides - from the Coorong side of the Murray mouth on the Younghusband Peninsula all the way to Kingston in the southeast.
And with the dire situation that existed along the Murray until October last year - when what Hoad calls The Flow saved the lower lakes and Coorong from excessive salinity - harvests have been poor in recent years.
Adding insult to injury, the last harvesting season was closed early due to concerns over E. coli levels in the pipis. The breaking of the drought and subsequent water flows down the Murray have turned things around.
So confident is South Australia's Department of Primary Industries and Regions of the fishery's health that the season's quota has been upped from 330 to 400 tonnes this season for the 32 Lakes and Coorong Fishery licences endorsed for pipi harvest. In fact Hoad and his family - brothers Matt and Tim, and father Kevin - are one of about 12 fishing businesses seriously active on the Coorong coast with cockles.
They also net commercially each day, depending on weather - Coorong mullet, flounder, bream and mulloway - and as a family hold four of those 32 licences.
But it's the old-fashioned, technologically unaided cockle harvesting that adds a romantic air to this traditional family business. And right now it's as good as it gets. "It's really good," says Hoad of the season that has just started. "Probably the best I've seen 'em for 10, maybe 15 years even."
In both size and yield, says Hoad, "the stock is excellent". But, like any primary industry, issues loom.
"The threat of marine parks hanging over our heads is a pretty big threat to us," says Hoad.
The imposition of marine park status on the Coorong lakes would limit netting areas and force cocklers further from the Murray mouth - about 20km - into a more concentrated area, according to Hoad.
"I guess every fishery around Australia is faced with that problem," he says.
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发表于 2012-1-12 08:28
