Bob Fraumeni gazes out the window at the vibrant float homes and fishing vessels docked at Fisherman’s Wharf and beyond to the wind-tossed waves of the Inner Harbour.
“I’ve been scrumbling around down there since I was about 10,” says Fraumeni, owner of Finest At Sea, a leading provider of wild seafood on the West Coast. “For some reason, I’ve had this incredible desire to find out what was in the water. I remember at the age of four, all I wanted to do was go fishing.”
In his second-floor office over the FAS fish market in a 1909 Victorian-style home on Erie Street, Fraumeni casts his memory back to the time, at age six, when he caught his first salmon with family friend George Shipley off Fiddle Reef in Oak Bay.
“I remember being on the water and loving it, just being free,” said Fraumeni. “So few people ever feel that today. Like Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean — ‘Bring me that horizon’ — that’s what it’s all about.”
But Fraumeni’s horizons may be moving after unsettling run-ins with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in recent years. In October, Fraumeni had to forfeit a $14,000 halibut catch after inadvertently contravening the conditions of a commercial fishing licence in March 2012. The court heard that Fraumeni was ill — he was diagnosed with leukemia four years ago — and an inexperienced skipper did not obtain an amendment to the fishing licence.
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“That cost me $50,000 in legal fees,” Fraumeni says. “DFO is extremely challenging to deal with. Even though I do all that work for them, they attack me.”
Fraumeni sits on six industry consulting boards for DFO. One of his boats, the Kingfisher, is doing a plankton sampling project for DFO and the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
Fraumeni is also upset that three RCMP officers and three Fisheries officers boarded his fishing vessel Ocean Pearl and tried to seize his catch when it docked in Prince Rupert in January.
A DFO spokeswoman said it was alerted by the U.S. Coast Guard to two incursions into U.S. waters by the Ocean Pearl between Dec. 27, 2014, and Jan. 13, 2015.
The U.S. could have taken action in this case, but elected to turn the file over to Canada, said the spokeswoman.
“As the matter is still under investigation, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time,” she said.
Fraumeni maintains the boat had drifted a few hundred yards across the U.S. border in a screaming gale in the Gulf of Alaska, hundreds of miles off the coast.
Transport Canada has also tied up the Ocean Pearl for months over “ridiculous stuff,” claims Fraumeni.
Last year, the Ocean Pearl was forced to dock for three months after Transport Canada brought in new regulations — for things such as life rafts and sewer systems — and demanded they be met immediately. Fraumeni says he wants more time to meet the demands.
“The cost of this downtime is huge. The Ocean Pearl is a world-class vessel. There’s no need to tie that boat up ever,” says Fraumeni.
“I can’t keep operating like this. I’m moving boats to the U.S. steadily. It’s not something I really wanted to do, but I can’t take it. I’ve already moved a few boats and I’ll move more if I have to. I’m not going to be treated like this. They’ve got me fighting constantly to survive. I’m Canadian, but the U.S. is all about business.”
Affectionately nicknamed Bobby Blackcod, Fraumeni has deep roots in the community.
At one point, his grandfather owned Sooke Bay, which ends at Ella Road in Sooke. The street is named for his mother, Ella Margaret Hemberow.
Patsy, as she was known to her friends, was a free spirit who married a would-be film producer, Guy Fraumeni, in New York City.
In 1957, after Fraumeni was born, Patsy left her husband and returned to Victoria with two young children.
Fraumeni’s childhood was marred by her ill health. Patsy, who died in 1986, went blind when he was four. He grew up “in many different places” between James Bay and Oak Bay.
From the age of eight, Fraumeni stayed with Daily Colonist writer Alec Merriman and his wife, Taffy. Merriman, who was known as Mr. King Fisherman, introduced him to serious fishing. And the little water rat ate it up, buying his first boat at age 11 for $100 and dragging it up on the beach in Gonzales Bay.
“I had outboards of all descriptions, none of which ran very well, that I’d rebuild and rebuild. One of them I used to have to start it on the log because the water was too cold. So I’d start it on the log and run down and put it on the boat, trying to get out of the way of the propeller,” says Fraumeni with a laugh. “Oh, those were good times.”
He just wanted to catch more fish and began selling seafood to Chinese restaurants.
During high school, Fraumeni worked on the big fish boats that sailed up the west coast from the Inner Harbour.
“My Grade 12 annual says, ‘Rob plans to go to university to become a commercial fisherman.’ My friend who wrote that was joking — but that’s exactly what I did.”
At 17, he bought his first west coast trawler, the Dixie Doll, for $36,000.
“It wasn’t much of a boat and it took a beating with the wind blowing northwest all summer.”
He took some marine biology courses at Camosun and the University of Victoria, but quit to become a full-time fisherman. By 19, Fraumeni was the owner of the Ocean Hunter, a sturdy 44-foot vessel. “And I got into freezing [the catch] right then in the late 1970s.”
Life was good. He was happy.
“It was just the most fantastic thing for a young guy in those days. There was a ton of fish and not many regulations. You could go out to sea with a freezer like that. You just go out until you were full. I remember coming in when I was 19 years old. I’d been out sailing around with my friend or my girlfriend, with $50,000 worth of fish. Nineteen years old. Hey, life is good. Can you imagine?
“And it was beautiful — blue water, big headlands, rough wilderness, straight wilderness and I went from border to border, fishing my pride into every nook and cranny all up the west coast. You catch these beautiful salmon and come in with these beautiful loads of fish. Oh God.
“If people in Toronto knew they could sell their house, come out here and buy a boat and a house, and make more money living up the west coast in two months than they did in Toronto, they wouldn’t believe it.”
Fraumeni says he learned about the tides and the currents and the winds simply by doing.
“I’ve been challenged all my life by the water,” says Fraumeni. He whips out his iPhone and plays a video of him driving the Ocean Pearl through hurricane-force winds in the Gulf of Alaska in December.
“This is a tremendous boat,” says Fraumeni, pointing at the massive waves crashing over her bow.
“It’s blowing 80 knots right there.”
The young Fraumeni rode the crest of a wave, but quickly realized he had to find a better business than salmon fishing. He started fishing for black cod — sablefish — and halibut.
“At first, no one wanted it here, but I knew it would take off. It’s hard to get, though, the deepest-water fish in the North Pacific. We’re regularly fishing a mile deep for black cod.”
Fraumeni started fishing all winter because he loved it, staying out on the Ocean Hunter, catching and freezing black cod. At the same time, a lot of the fishing fleet went broke because interest rates went up to 24 per cent.
“While they were going broke, I was out there fishing like a fiend. Then I started to make a lot of money.”
He also started spending a lot of money on bigger boats and fish stores and investing money in the science of Canadian fisheries to make them sustainable.
“I can’t see why as a hunter you could think you could just keep hunting. We have to look at the much bigger picture. What you take out of the planet you should put back in,” says Fraumeni, who has fought against open net-cage salmon farming. “Please look at what we have here — Pacific salmon and this incredible ecosystem. Why risk it for farming a few stupid salmon?”
On a practical level, sustainable fishing practices means not fishing a lot of the time, keeping the yield small, Fraumeni explains.
In 1986, he started the Canadian Sablefish Association, taking fees from black cod fisherman to develop the science to understand what levels are necessary for a sustainable harvest.
Fraumeni sells his catch to 350 restaurants in B.C. and others in Calgary and Edmonton. His latest order from the Parliamentary restaurant in Ottawa was for candied salmon, sablefish and sliced tuna. Finest at Sea also supplies salmon, halibut and tuna to Jimmy Pattison’s five Urban Fare stores.
Behind the neon signs advertising his Fish Market in James Bay, Fraumeni sells salmon, tuna, halibut, prawns, crab, oysters and mussels. The food cart tucked in at the back of the parking lot sells fish tacos, fish and chips, chowder, salmon and ling cod fritters.
In Vancouver, Fraumeni owns a fish plant, two stores, a bistro, two food carts and a Finest At Sea delicatessen on Arbutus in Vancouver.
“Getting into the sales end has been a wonderful thing for me. It’s so fun. I employ so many wonderful people. And our retail customers, that’s whom I cherish.”
In 1987, Bob met his wife Barbara. They married and Bob adopted her two children, William, now 33, and Caitlin, 30. The couple have two children of their own, Alec, 20, and Madeline, 17, who is studying in New Zealand.
Fraumeni says he feels blessed after battling two serious illness in recent years. When he turned 50, Fraumeni had a aneurysm behind his right eye that was supposed to kill him, he says.
Four years ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia and, again, he was supposed to die. “I was given a death warrant and I fought like crazy. The DFO fiasco was in the middle of all that,” says Fraumeni. “I’m really lucky, really lucky. I seem to be okay.”
Leaving the view, Fraumeni walks downstairs to the fish market. He pauses to look at a model of the Ocean Pearl and the many photographs of his fishing fleet that line the walls. In each one, he’s wearing a grin a nautical mile wide.