Seafood lovers beware - the price of calamari, whiting and flathead will surge if wild weather continues to keep fishing boats on shore, experts say.
High winds had made it too dangerous to work for many fishing trawlers on parts of coastal Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and South Australia, industry veteran Michael Canal said.
The owner of specialty fish wholesaler CQ Foods said the cost of popular seafood would likely increase 5 to 10 per cent early next week as the scarcity of the fish began to impact prices.
“We’ve still been getting fish into the market because in Melbourne and Sydney product comes from all over Australia, and in fact New Zealand and Indonesia,” he said.
“But within the next three to five days things will start getting very scarce.”
Mr Canal said he expected next to no fish going to market from Port Philip Bay, where calamari, whiting and sardines were caught.
If the high winds and storms continued for another fortnight seafood lovers could see more dramatic price rises, he said.
“It does just take a day or two for all this to work through the system, it may not start hitting the retail side of things until early next week,” he said.
Mr Canal, who has worked in the industry for more than three decades, said high winds stopped trawlers going to sea for short periods nearly every year.
But the past four to five years had been particularly windy and this week had seen an especially long period of bad weather.
On the windiest days even kingfish and tuna farmers had struggled to harvest their fish, he said.
“There’s a flow-on effect, so once you get the regular things like the whiting and flathead and sardines increasing it tends to push everything else up as well, garfish will probably get expensive,” he said.
Lakes Entrance Fishermen's Coop general manager Dale Sumner said high winds and four-metre waves in eastern Victoria had kept eight to 10 smaller fishing trawlers in port this week, but the weather had not been nearly as bad as in Melbourne and larger boats had been able to keep working.
“There are some fishermen out there braving these sort of conditions, if you thought it was bad on the bay the other day you can imagine what it was like right off in the open ocean,” he said.
Smaller boats fished tiger flathead and school whiting, so he expected a small price spike in those species.
Mr Sumner said the smaller trawlers were all independently owned, which meant families were without income when they could not work.
