You can live in an island nation and still struggle to buy decent fish. That’s how broken the seafood system has become.
Our Souls of the Sea believes locally caught fish belong on local plates. It is a basic idea, but one that modern industrial seafood systems often seem to forget.
If you already side-eye glossy “sustainability” claims around the ocean, this story cuts through the fluff. Small-scale fishing in Aotearoa New Zealand isn’t being pitched as a nicer label. It’s being rebuilt as a different way of catching, handling, selling and sharing food.
The film below shows what that looks like once the marketing falls away.
The seafood system is broken long before the fish hits the shelf
One of the sharpest lines in the film lands early! Most New Zealanders can’t afford decent-quality seafood from the supermarket. What’s sitting there is expensive, old, poor quality and stripped of any story. For a country surrounded by the ocean, that’s absurd.
When food loses its place, season and source, it turns into a commodity first and subsistence second. You don’t know who caught it, how it was handled, what got wasted, or how much pressure was put on the stock before it reached the shelf.
Nate from Gravity Fishing knows that system from the inside. When he first ran his own boat, he used industrial methods, mainly pot fishing, and was averaging around 750 to 800 kilograms of whole fish a day. On paper, that looks efficient. In the water, he saw something else, a wild food resource getting hammered because humans had become far too good at extracting it.
“If you’re roughly four times better off per kilo, you can afford to take roughly four times fewer fish.”
This is the part a lot of seafood talk skips. Efficiency isn’t automatically a virtue when you’re dealing with living systems. A fishery can be organised, profitable and technically impressive, whilst still putting brutal pressure on fish stocks in a short space of time.
You can see the contrast in the MSC’s New Zealand hoki case study. That’s one version of the sustainability story at scale. Gravity Fishing is making a different argument, smaller boats, fewer fish, better handling and local access that people can actually recognise.
Then there’s the waste. Nate gives a blunt blue cod example:
- Around 1.6kg of whole fish is needed to produce 1kg of boneless fillet.
- The part removed from that equation doesn’t disappear because it has no value, it disappears because the retail model often doesn’t want to deal with it.
- Once you scale that kind of processing across commercial volumes, the waste becomes huge.
That’s why the film keeps returning to whole fish. Not because it’s trendy. Because a whole fish still has meaning, and far less of it gets treated like rubbish.
Hook and line changes the relationship between fisher and fish
The answer Gravity Fishing landed on wasn’t clever branding. It was simple enough to sound both obvious and impactful: take fewer fish.
That meant leaving industrial-style harvesting behind and going direct to market. Instead of chasing volume for someone else’s supply chain, they switched to hand lines. The set-up is modest, a bit of rope, some lead weights and hooks. No flashy kit. No giant machinery. No need to turn the ocean into a production line.
That smallness is the point. If you only have a certain number of hooks in the water, you cap what you can take. Compare that with a net, where the catch can run ahead of your control. Hook and line fishing lets them target the fish they need for the orders they already have, instead of dragging up whatever turns up and dealing with the consequences later.
It also changes what “sustainable” means on deck. The fish aren’t trapped in a cage or left drowning in a net. Gravity Fishing doesn’t target a single species year-round, either. They fish seasonally, only putting time into species when they’re in season and at their best nutritionally for people to eat.
That respect carries right through handling. Bulk harvesting doesn’t leave much room to look after each fish properly. Small-scale fishing does, and the chefs buying from them notice the difference. In the film, they’re told over and over that the fish is easier to cook because it arrives in such good condition. That’s not luck. That’s what care looks like.
They also use the Japanese ikejime method on the boat. The fish is killed quickly and humanely, with the aim of reducing suffering and preserving quality. Nate describes it as an intimate few seconds, calm, peaceful and honest about what is happening.
“You’re taking a life to feed another.”
There isn’t any pretending in that. No sanitised supermarket distribution. No separation between life taken and meal served. For anyone who spends time in the sea and claims to care about it, that kind of honesty hits harder than any eco-tag ever will.
Taking fewer fish works because the numbers change
This model isn’t only about ethics. It works because the money works differently.
Nate says that if they were fishing for bigger companies, particularly for blue cod, they’d be getting around NZ$3.50 to NZ$5 per kilo. By catching with hook and line and selling whole fish direct, they’re getting around NZ$20 to NZ$22.50 per kilo. The figures in the film make the point better than any slogan:
| Model | Price achieved | Catch method | What gets sold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selling into bigger company supply chains | NZ$3.50 to NZ$5 per kg | Industrial-style methods | Commodity volume |
| Selling direct as whole fish | NZ$20 to NZ$22.50 per kg | Hook and line | Higher-value whole fish |
The takeaway is plain. If you’re roughly four times better off per kilo, you can afford to take roughly four times fewer fish. Nate calls it a no-brainer, and it’s hard to argue with that.
That shift also explains why whole fish matters so much here. Filleting everything down into standard retail units pushes the product towards anonymous sameness. Selling whole fish keeps more of the value in the fish, and more of the story intact. Around Stewart Island, blue cod isn’t some generic white protein. Straight off the boat, it’s local food with a face behind it.
Gravity Fishing only catches the order. They send customers a bulk email, tell them which species they’re targeting based on the season, then head out to meet those orders and those orders only. That’s a very different rhythm from catch first, sell later. It cuts waste, eases pressure and keeps the harvester tied to real demand.
The lifestyle changed as well. What had once clocked up around 3,500 hours of engine time dropped to about 700 hours a year, not counting the nights they used to spend away. That’s a massive reduction in fuel, grind and time lost to family life. The film is clear about this point, the switch wasn’t only a business move. It was a choice about how to live.
Their ethics don’t stop at the shoreline
The sea isn’t the only place where this family thinks in seasons. The same approach carries onto land.
Anna says it plainly, sustainability and ethics on the water are the same deal at home. Seasons matter. You tune into nature or you don’t. Over about eight years on their property, the family has tried to grow as much food as possible, eat organically and know exactly where their food comes from and what goes into it.
That matters because food systems don’t split neatly into categories. The same person who wants traceable fish often wants traceable vegetables too. The same family who doesn’t want to waste fish frames will find a use for scraps at home, whether that’s cooking them up or feeding animals. Once you start paying attention, the line between sea ethics and land ethics gets pretty thin.
Their children are being raised inside that logic. Aurora loves helping in the garden, pulling weeds and identifying plants. Forest has the nickname “Forest the forager”, which tells you plenty on its own. His education isn’t boxed into abstraction. It’s tied to living skills, growing food, harvesting it, learning the names of things and understanding the places that feed you.
For anyone who spends time in the ocean, this probably sounds familiar. If you’re tired of vague eco-language in surf culture, the same scrutiny belongs here. The questions behind exploring sustainable surfing innovations belong in seafood too: who made it possible, what methods were used, what got wasted, and who kept the value once the product left the water?
There’s no clean split between environmental care and community care in this film. It’s all one conversation. The ocean feeds the household. The garden feeds the household. The children learn from both. That’s a far more honest picture of sustainability than the polished version that gets sold back to consumers.
The bigger plan is lots of small fishing businesses, not one giant brand
At some point, Nate realised that his own boat and his own choices weren’t enough. The problem was bigger than one operation. So the next step became sharing what they’d learned and making it possible for other fishers to do something similar.
That’s where the model gets interesting. With funding secured through SFF and MPI, the idea is to set up infrastructure in different regions around New Zealand so local fishers can feed local communities. Not by disappearing into one centralised brand, but by staying visible as individual harvesters with their own names, methods and stories.
“It’s not about franchising and going big or go home. It’s about empowering lots of little communities and lots of little businesses to shine their own light.”
That line gets to the heart of it. Plenty of businesses talk about localism, then flatten everything into the same label. This model goes the other way. The harvester stays the harvester.
The infrastructure is practical. Ice-making machines. Chilling units. Fish are packed at 0 °C to cut down the chance of bacteria. Units that arrive with a quota attached, so fishers don’t have to go out and source quota themselves. If you’ve got a registered fishing vessel and a QRN, you can head to sea, catch a small amount of fish, list it on the ordering platform, and by the time you’ve docked and tied up, the money is in your bank.
That’s a serious change for young fishers who are capable of doing the work but get blocked by red tape and cost before they even begin.
The North Island example in the film is Sealective, with Mish taking the idea on board. For years, he’d been asked where people could buy paua and kina. Suddenly, there was a path to an answer. Sealective is harvesting three species at the moment, butterfish, paua and kina. The butterfish is hand-speared, and all of it is done on breath-hold.
That sort of selective, place-based approach isn’t limited to one business either. Chatham Island Food’s outline of its fisheries practices describes local restrictions, selective methods and reef-by-reef shellfish management. The details vary, but the principle is familiar: smaller-scale fisheries can still be serious, viable and rooted in place.
The ripple effect could be bigger than the catch itself. One person lands the fish. Another fillets it. Someone else smokes it, cans it, bottles it or pickles it. Instead of value bleeding out of the region, more of it stays close to shore.
Giving the fish back to the people is the real point
Nate’s vision for the model is blunt and generous at the same time, give the fish back to the people. By “the people”, he means the five million people living in New Zealand.
That shouldn’t sound radical. In an island nation, local seafood should not feel like a luxury item with no clear origin. Yet that’s where many modern systems end up, exporting product, concentrating access and leaving local communities with high prices and low connection. The film frames this as a restoration job. New Zealand once had little fishing ports all over the country. Over time, that regional access got squeezed out by the way the system was geared.
The model Gravity Fishing is building tries to reverse that drift. It keeps the fish in New Zealand. It keeps the story with the harvester. It creates more room for regional jobs. It also asks the public to treat seafood as a precious food resource, not a cheap, endless commodity. You can see that ethos across Gravity Fishing’s own work.
For surfers, divers and anyone else who treats the ocean as more than scenery, that’s the deeper pull of this story. Healthy seas don’t come from slogans. They come from limits, from seasonality, from respect, from keeping food webs and communities intact instead of stripping them for short-term gain.
The most ambitious claim in the film isn’t about disruption for its own sake. It’s the hope that regulators, and maybe the wider world, will recognise that this way of fishing is more sustainable and more ethical than the systems we’ve normalised. Not perfect. Not magic. Just more honest, more careful and far easier to defend.
Final thoughts
An island nation struggling to access good local fish is a sign that something has gone badly off course. This film shows one way back.
The strongest idea here is simple: community access matters as much as catch volume. When smaller boats take fewer fish, handle them well, sell them whole and keep value close to home, the ocean is treated less like an extraction site and more like the living source it is.
If seafood-rich places can’t feed their own people with dignity, quality and care, the problem isn’t scarcity. It’s the system.