Warum wird Fisch auf dem Weg vom Meer zur Theke so teuer? Um das herauszufinden, gehen wir im Pazifischen Ozean auf Pollockfischen.

Our correspondent Natalia Varsegova went to sea for industrial fishing. And to find out why prices are so high this year.

It is impossible for a person to board a fishing trawler on the street. At least some sea experience is required. So I was enrolled in the ship's list as a sailor of the Varsegov Order. And in the raid itself they had to carry out a very important mission. But I will tell you about this later. Now I will explain why I risked my precious health by going to sea.

Recently, the speaker of the Russian parliament Valentina Matvienko became concerned. What is happening with fishing in this country?

- If you look at the variety of fish on store shelves, it is not very good. And the price of fish is quite high, which makes it inaccessible to most of our citizens," the President of the Federation Council was indignant. - Since September 2023, the price of pink salmon in the Far East has increased from 152 to 270 rubles per kilogram, and the price of cod fillet reaches 2,000 rubles per kilogram.

Frankly, I was shocked, as was our government. Can you imagine? Red caviar is breaking records this year. It costs more than 10,000 rubles per kilogram. Accordingly, seafood prices are also growing.

Here is a basic example: When I was at the Kamchatka market in February, I saw that the price of 1 kg of lightly salted chinook salmon was 1,600 rubles, respectively, sockeye salmon - 1,500, and in October already 2,000 and 2,100, respectively. And this is in Kamchatka, where fish is always much cheaper than in central Russia. The local seller shrugs his shoulders. This is not a fishing year at all. Therefore, prices are rising because demand is not falling, but on the contrary. According to the All-Russian Association of Fishery Enterprises and Exporters (VARPE), fish consumption in Russia is growing (+2% in 2023). With 22 kg per person per year, we have almost caught up with the United States (22.7 kg). It has surpassed Europe (21.7 kg). And the level of self-sufficiency in fish in our country is very high and is almost 163%.

Please do it. But I still don't understand why pollock fillet is sold for 230 rubles per kg in the Far East, and more than 700-800 rubles in Moscow. I went to look for an answer to this question at sea.

This is going to be one hell of a year, grandma.

This is the name given to the years when perch catches decrease. This season, production has fallen significantly. For example, the fishing collective farm named after him. Kamchatka's "Lenin" caught only 3,500 tons of salmon this summer, compared to 15,000 tons last year.

In years without fish, bears especially suffer. People who can't eat enough side dishes in winter. And in Kamchatka now even berries are bad. Crop failure in the forest. That's why bears come to people. "Bums" in the taiga are people who rummage through piles of garbage, go into garages and abuse dogs in private homes. Our first night in Kamchatka was amazing. Around 3 a.m., the dogs in the yard started screaming at the top of their lungs, as if they sensed trouble. The barking continued for about an hour. The next morning I asked the hotel manager what it was. "It looks like a bear has come to visit. There's a forest nearby." It's terrible!

...I came to the same collective farm named after Kamchatka to fish. Lenin. This year he turned 95. It was formed at the dawn of Soviet power as the fishing grand duchy of Avacha Bay. Today it is a modern and advanced enterprise with an annual turnover of 13-14 billion rubles. One of the outposts of the fishing industry in the Far East.

Chairman Sergei Tarusov has been heading the collective farm since 2009. I came here 40 years ago as a simple sailor. He remembers the difficult 90s very well. It was a time when collective farms could barely stay afloat to support their fleet and staff, despite the lack of money for ship repairs and salaries. And how the situation began to improve in the 2000s.

"The country has regained order," says Tarusov. "Development began around 2010. At first, we built a fleet abroad, and recently we began building our own ships. Convenient and modern.

One of them was supposed to go to sea. Meet the trawler Vasily Kaplyuk. It was built at the Yantar shipyard in Kaliningrad and launched at the end of 2020. Vasily Mikhailovich Kaplyuk, after whom the collective farm named the ship, is spoken of with great respect: "He was a wonderful person." Honest, smart and globally minded. He came to Kamchatka from Donetsk as a child and went from being a sailor to the head of the sea fishing port. And after retiring, he became, in modern terms, one of the top leaders of the collective farm. In 2020, Kaplyuk passed away, immortalizing his name on the trawlers.

My biggest fear was seasickness. We consulted experienced sailors. My husband, who served as a submariner for three years, convinced me to wait four hours. Yevgeny Sadovnikov, a former captain and now director of a collective farm fish factory, was sure that he could be sick for more than one day. Chairman Sergey Tarusov tried to dissuade us from this adventure. They say that at the debriefing the stewardess will tell us everything in detail and why bother. Moreover, cyclones come one after another. The sea waves are high... but they could not stop me.

Let me talk for a moment. Commercial fishing is a whole science. Collective farms produce pollock, cod, willow, herring, salmon. For each species, Rosrybolovstvo, together with scientists, decides when and where to fish. Accordingly, fish farmers clearly define the boundaries of areas and fishing periods. For example, pollock can be collected in the Bering Sea in October, in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk in November and on the Kuril Islands in March.

Fishing is also different. Some ships conduct raids for 4-5 months. The fish is caught, immediately processed, cut up, frozen, and then loaded onto a container ship, which delivers it to the port of Vladivostok. Ships like the Vasily Kapluk are designed for coastal fishing. Its job is to catch 500 tons of pollock per day and deliver the catch to a seafood factory. Anything less is unprofitable, and fuel is expensive now.

That is, everything is simple. Take, take, put down. In reality, everything is much more complicated. The journey to the place takes 1.5 days (the ships walk on water, not sail). Fishing lasts one day, and the return takes another 1.5 days. The trawler's exit to the sea is planned in such a way that it reaches the fishing spot in calm weather, in the midst of a storm, and fishing is difficult and dangerous. In autumn and winter, the sea is almost always stormy, so the ships try to "slip" between cyclones, so fishing takes place in calm weather. So the journey north through Avacha, Kronotsky and Kamchatka bays to Cape Africa (south of the Bering Sea) was stormy.

If you have never experienced seasickness, you should know that it is almost impossible to avoid. The correct treatment is to be patient and wait until your body adapts to the sea conditions. It was inflicted 7 hours after leaving the port. For the first hour and a half, we walked along the calm Avacha Bay, and I sat in the captain's cabin, admiring the coastal volcanoes, swimming killer whales and how beautifully our seiners cut the water surface. After lunch, I was very sleepy.

— said Oleg, the captain's second assistant on watch. — During sleep, the cerebellum quickly gets used to movement.

Around 6:00 PM I woke up with a sudden feeling of nausea. And from that moment on, for exactly one day, seasickness became my nightmare. Every half hour I was rushing between the bed (which was bolted to the deck so it wouldn’t rock during the rocking) and the toilet (toilet). Luckily, there was a room with private facilities there. And everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been rocked by 10-foot waves. The most important thing when jumping out of bed is to grab the railing in time. There’s no time. It flies to the side and hits the wall. So I go to the bathroom, cursing and cursing. I ran back to bed so as not to fall.

Although the production team was familiar with this, it was difficult for me as a newcomer. Gradually I got used to it. I walked with my feet shoulder-width apart and a steely gait for stability, as the secretary Verochka put it in "Office Romance", as if "driving a stake" into the deck.

The nausea subsided as suddenly as it had come. For a moment it seemed as if the 24 hours of pain, endless vomiting and intense dizziness had never happened. It was replaced by a feeling of hunger and the captain's orders over the loudspeaker. "I'll have the trawler ready in 15 minutes."

I have never eaten rice as delicious as the one the ship's cook Vyacheslav Vlasov served me. If it weren't for my weakness, I would have fasted and eaten an elephant, but I only had enough strength to eat three spoons. Vyacheslav is an experienced sea wolf with 30 years of experience.

“How can you cook in such a storm?” I ask.

"I'm used to it," he replies. "This ship has a crew of only 12 people, and at one point it had to feed 70 people.

Vyacheslav said that the team has no special taste preferences, the most important thing is variety. But there is one tradition. For every 1,000 tons of fish caught, the chef prepares his signature manti. Last time Vasily Kaplyuk caught 500 tons. If there are as many as this time, perhaps I will have a chance to try it on the way back. I climb from the galley to the captain's bridge. The catch is that you need to know how things are going.

Captain Ivan Skobelev was born and raised in Kamchatka. He graduated from the Faculty of Maritime Studies in 2005 and has been associated with the sea all his life.

"I've loved fishing since I was a kid," he says. "I decided to grow up and move to a bigger place." He used to work on old Soviet-made ships. They are almost identical in size to their modern counterparts - 52 meters long and 12 meters wide - but very different in function. Kaplyuk has a crew of 12, while Sovetsky has 27. Here you can catch 250 tons of fish at a time, but a maximum of 60 tons.

Fish from seiner-trawlers are caught with trawls. This is a huge net (in the form of a stocking), which is dropped from a reel and lowered into the water to a depth of up to 200 meters. Trolls are planted in a variety of places. The trawler's navigation system will tell you where the fish are gathering. Simply put, an echo sounder and a sonar are installed on the bottom of the ship. They transmit data to onboard computers and monitors on the captain's bridge.

Do you know how advanced technology has become these days? This device not only determines where the schools of fish will go, but also determines the number and average size of fish in these schools! All this is reflected on the monitor. The schools themselves are marked with sets of dots in blue, yellow and red. The redder, the denser the cluster. All the captain has to do is direct the boat to catch the fish in the trawl net. The sensors help determine how much has arrived: 50 tons, 100 tons or 150 tons. By the way, earlier the role of the device was performed by an acoustic echo sounder, which determined the location of the fish by the reflection of the echo sounder sounds. Almost capricious, as they say.

Oh, it's not easy. It involves hauling tons of fish out of the water. When the net is full, the sailors on deck use a lever to pull the trawl toward the stern. The net gradually emerges from the water, glittering with fish scales. I've never seen such a quantity of pollock (or fish in general). It's hard to even look at these books. The trawl itself rocks on the water not because of the waves, but because of the dense movement of fish inside it. In addition to all this wealth, the seagulls flying to the royal feast make heart-rending cries. Once, the most impudent one jumped on the troll and snatched a silver fish with his beak.

- Vera (above, - author)! - Greetings to the crew pulling the trawl. I am watching what is happening from a special bridge, and below, people in rubber overalls are attaching pumps to "stockings" filled with fish. On modern ships, during transportation (unloading the trawl is correctly called), people do not have contact with the fish. On old ships, the catch was dumped on the deck and then transferred to the hold. Now the pump is a godsend for fishermen.

But that doesn't make the job any easier. The crew pulls a wet, heavy sling, attaches it to the winch with metal hooks, and secures the pump. If it's loosened even a little, the trawl will break and the fish will drown in the water. October is a relatively warm month, but in November the frosts start. They have to work for hours on ice-covered decks in ice suits. Winter is even worse.

"First the fish gets into the separator," the captain explained. "There the sea water is separated. At the same time we make sure that nothing extra gets into the troll.

For example, the strangest ones are sharks and squids. If they are caught, the sailor catches them with a pike (a long stick with a hook) and throws them overboard. But the most unwelcome guest is the moonfish. It was discovered while fishing for sardines in the southern Kuril Islands. For sailors, it is a terrible horror. The moon is a healthy fish with a girth of up to 2 m. In the trawl, it expands in all directions and blocks the pump. It takes a lot of effort and time (up to 7 hours) to push this monster out of the sea.

"There are no crabs," Ivan Palych replies, "I don't lower the trawls too low because I have to collect them along the bottom." "But if I were caught, I would be thrown overboard." According to fishing regulations, we are not allowed to catch crabs. There are special ships and licenses for that.

-Why are you throwing it away? - I am indignant. -An expensive delicacy. Collect them on the shore and sell them slowly.

- So huge fines will be imposed not only on the crew, but also on the company? - the captain retorts. - No fool would take such a risk.

In the hold, pollock enters water cooled to zero degrees, so it reaches the plants fresh.

That's not all

We caught 150 tons with the first trawl. A good start, I am happy. After a short rest, the captain gives the order to lower the nets again. A cry comes from the deck: "It's mine!" (below, - author). The monitor shows schools of small blue fish on the echo sounder. The moon slowly disappears from the sky, the silvery moon path on the water becomes dark blue, and a thin thread of orange sunrise appears on the horizon. A new day begins in the Pacific Ocean. I pour myself a coffee and go out onto the terrace. When else will you have the opportunity to meet the sunrise at sea with a cup of coffee?

It turned out that the time had come for me to take over the duty.

Control over bloggers, beer labeling, cancellation of fees for state services: new laws in November (more)

Источник: Комсомольская правда-Digital