Yes, we have no fresh fish

Photo by David Lansing.

I think I mentioned that just outside of town is a fish factory. It’s called PAFCO (Pacific Fishing Company) and is a joint venture between the Japanese and the Fijian government. The thing is, if the fish factory wasn’t here, I doubt very much whether Levuka would be either because there’s really no other commerce. Certainly no tourism.

Back in the day when Levuka was booming (which would be in the 1870s and 1880s), Levuka was sort of a transshipment point for the copra trade. But the last of that business was gone by the late 1950s. And the town sort of frittered away. Until the Japanese fish cannery was established.

It’s an ugly, stinky place, as canneries tend to be, but nobody here is complaining. Everyone knows the deal: no cannery, no Levuka. So they live with it.

So what happens is that long-range fishing boats, from all over the South Seas, bring in huge loads of mostly 40- to 50-lb. albacore which are then cleaned and cooked under high-pressure steam before being chunked and canned. Then it’s put back on boats and shipped off to Europe or Canada.

The PAFCO plant also has high-tech freezing facilities where they process other types of fish, from swordfish to walu, as well as tuna. In fact, overall, the factory processes over 16,000 tons of fish a year. That’s a lot of fish.

I mention this because it is almost impossible to get fresh fish anywhere in Levuka. I’m not even sure most residents here even know what fresh fish is. There’s a little fish market on Beach Street, called J. Loa’s, but if you go inside, as I did Saturday morning, what you’ll find are a couple of floor freezers stocked with mostly frozen walu.

“Do you have any fresh fish this morning?”

“Fresh?”

“Yes, fresh.”

“You mean like not frozen?”

“Exactly.”

“No, sir. Just the frozen.”

Same thing at Whale’s Tale. The décor, such as it is, may be nautical in nature—a wooden dolphin, Japanese glass floats, a rusty fish scale—but when you order the walu steak, sautéed in garlic lemon butter, the cook has to go to the freezer and pull out a frozen piece of fish and stick it in the microwave.

It’s the oddest thing: a fishing village that processes 32 million pounds of fish a year—32 million!—but doesn’t have any fresh fish. Go figure.