Isle aux Morts

His voice came over the phone line in rapid-fire, cleanly-accented Parisian French. In Paris they speak quickly, it is the rhythm of the place, but the speed and syntax entering my ear owed more to the speaker's present location than the one he had left. The cadence spoke of his passion for his project and the urgency he feels to complete the preparations and get production underway.
I was talking to Frederic Petroff in Isle aux Morts, a handful of kilometres east of Port aux Basques on the road to Rose Blanche. Not so strange a location for a Parisian to fetch up, given the French language place names all along that coast. But the former real estate agent in the capital of France had come here, not for the place names but for the number one reason in his former profession: location, location, location.
He had come to open a fish plant.
Some would think this runs against the current. Indeed the very day after our phone conversation the Barry Group announced they were closing their plant 20 kilometres away in Port aux Basques putting more than a hundred people out of work.
In their own way, Frederic Petroff and Bill Barry are both right, according to their separate philosophies of fish processing.
Before that plant closed, Bill Barry was selling his under-processed Port aux Basques fish into the US market in the time-honoured fashion of so many fish plant owners in this province.
The standard practice has been to place little value on the product itself, regarding the flesh of the fish as simply a vehicle for fat-filled batter on its way to fast-food chains stateside. Historically the margins were tiny, profits generated by volume sales and the difference in the Canadian and US currencies. That no longer works, and it won't until the fish population rises and the dollar plummets.
Petroff's strategy is entirely different. His approach is centred on the value of the raw product. Seen from Paris, the waters along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador are cold and clean, home to fish with dense, firm flesh. Pure is a word that Petroff repeats often.
His philosophy is to treat the raw product as a precious resource, to catch it in a way that does as little harm as possible, to bring it ashore rapidly and process it carefully in a labour-intensive hands-on process all the way to a retail-ready state, then sell it as a pure, high-end delicacy into countries who historically appreciate fish and whose currencies are more valuable than ours.
My phone conversation with Frederic Petroff made me want to meet him.
A tall, smiling man in his forties, dressed in Riff's work clothes greeted me at the door of the former kelp plant he has bought and is renovating on a hill overlooking Isle aux Morts.
Seated in a metal, stacking chair on the unpainted plywood floor of his littered office, I was struck by how far we were from the elegant sidewalk cafÉs of Paris. Judging by the screwdrivers and wrenches that shared space with stacks of files on his desk, I was in the company of a no-nonsense, grease-under-the-fingernails chief executive officer.
In the two hours that followed, I was struck by many things, the unifying theme of which was original thinking coupled with determination and a desire to learn.
Some of the points we discussed:
Petroff bought almost all the fish-processing-machinery, second-hand, in Europe and brought it here by ship, having calculated that the price was less expensive, even taking into account the transformers to change voltage.
He is struck by the hard-working nature of Newfoundlanders and their attachment to their home, but also by the deception they feel at the collapse of the fishery and the moratorium. He volunteered that it was important to earn the trust of people in the community given that the lure of Alberta cash is calling out to everyone.
One of the ways he hopes to do this is to enter into partnership with local people and to offer profit-sharing to the employees to make them feel part of the operation. As a start he hopes to partner with the operators of the kelp plant he bought, to revive their cash-starved enterprise.
He is excited by the possibilities for making valuable products from fish offal, including high-end skin cream that fetches a very high price in European boutiques.
Without revealing details that were discussed off the record, Petroff has plans to come as close as possible to using every part of the raw material he harvests from the sea.
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have experienced a long list of foreigners arriving on these shores making extravagant promises that ended in tears. Petroff has learned some of these stories since he arrived nearly two years ago. He understands that some people are skeptical, but his philosophy of very carefully using a precious resource in short supply to make the maximum profit seems only logical to him. He is not interested in following the traditional path of other fish processors in the province.
That route, I am sure he would agree, leads the island part of this province only one way, to become l'Isle aux Morts, the Island of the Dead.
As if to confirm this, only days after my interview with Frederic Petroff, The Barry Group announced yet another closure, this time the crab plant in Trouty which processed over four million pounds last season.
Isle aux Morts indeed.

Peter Pickersgill is an artist and writer living in Salvage. His column returns Nov. 19.