Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/122153
Then there's Port Lincoln itself, the seafood capital of Australia, with its pronged headlands, which look like the claws of a blue swimmer crab, protecting Boston Bay, one of the largest harbours in the world, where tuna are ranched and kingfish and mussels are farmed. After our tour of Craig's fish-processing plant, we enjoy a tasting platter of spectacularly flavoured lime and ginger mussels, smoked oysters and tuna. This month, The Fresh Fish Place is launching the Eyre Peninsula's first seafood cooking school, an exciting new offering of the Eyre Peninsula Seafood Trail, which will be expanded throughout 2013 into a fully-fledged Culinary Adventure Guide. "We'll have visiting chefs doing demonstrations, as well as local identities from the Croatian, Italian and Japanese communities giving classes about oysters, how to prepare raw tuna and kingfish, and different ways to cook whole fish," says Craig. Food provides a fascinating insight into the culture of a place, and it turns out that Croatians, Italians and Japanese have all made a big impact here. One of the best ways to learn more is via a Swim with the Tuna adventure. On the 20-minute boat ride to the tuna pontoon, Steve Wilson relates Port Lincoln's tuna story. Wild tuna used to be polled and brought back to canneries, but the imposition of quotas in the 1980s led enterprising local tuna fisherman Dinko Lukin and Joe Puglisi to invent tuna ranching whereby wild tuna is caught from December to February and towed back to pens outside Port Lincoln, where the fish are fattened for six months to double their weight before being sold to the premium Japanese sushi market. The tuna industry got a crash course in Japanese and started practising iki jime, the Japanese way to kill fish with a brain spike between the eyes to prevent the stress that affects the quality of the precious pink flesh. While commercial pens will have up to 4,000 tuna, Swim with the Tuna's pontoon has a comfortable 60 "pets", as Steve calls them. We don wetsuits, gloves and booties and hop into the outer pool as he throws juicy pilchards into the water. In a flash, these chubby 'cheetahs of the sea' streak past us to grab the fish in a feeding frenzy and we're thrillingly swept up in the midst of it all. There's nothing like a visceral experience to get the full measure of the tuna biz in Port Lincoln, which is renowned for having more millionaires per capita than any other community in Australia. It turns out that local tuna baron Sam Sarin built the waterfront Port Lincoln Hotel, partly so Japanese buyers would have a nice place to stay. Indeed, our room is delightful with a deck for viewing the action on Boston Bay. Sam's restaurant, called Sarin's, is the perfect place to sample tuna rosettes on wakame seaweed and sesame-crusted tuna steaks, washed down with a minerally riesling from Boston Bay Wines, which is owned by abalone fishing family the Fords. Going Image: Susan Gough Henly regionalstopover for a walk along the pretty foreshore, we discover a statue of Makybe Diva, the three-time Melbourne Cup winner owned by another tuna baron, Tony Santic. The next morning we head to the oyster beds of Coffin Bay, the name of which, thankfully, has nothing to do with putting oyster-lovers into coffins. Matthew Flinders navigated this coastline during his 1802 journey. Many of the names he gave to the geographical features of the coast – Seasick Bay, Cape Catastrophe and Anxious Bay – reflected the trials of his voyage, but he named Coffin Bay after Sir Isaac Coffin, a Royal Navy commissioner who helped to prepare the expedition. Protected by long sandspits, Coffin Bay's huge, shallow estuary has a strong tidal flow bringing in nutrients from the Southern Ocean, and no rivers Previous page, above from top: The Eyre Peninsula is renowned for its pristine waters; a tasting plate of Port Lincoln produce; fishing boats at the marina in Port Lincoln. XXV