“The aim of it [the Deep to Dish Experience] is we teach people how to catch their seafood, where to catch it, how to clean it and how to cook it,” Shane says. “We’re all commercial fishermen and women on board. We’ve got a lot of years of experience doing what we do, so what we’re actually telling you is something that we’ve put a whole career into learning. At the end of it you’ve got 16 different dishes, we even bake a Tasmanian apple cake on board for you throughout the day. We pair everything with Tassie beer, wine, champagne and cider, it is a whole immersive experience. By the time you’re done, and you are coming back up the river and everyone’s had a few drinks, a lot of seafood, falling asleep on the couch, it’s just like Christmas. “At the time [of Covid] we were between 75 to 85 per cent international guests. That was our market. So one day the tap turned off on them and it’s only just reopened up now. But we were lucky that because we work across several different fields, we actually didn’t have to let anyone go. We shifted everyone across to that aquaculture scene because that didn’t stop, working with oyster farms and working with the salmon farms, we managed to keep everyone through and keep everybody employed the whole way through and they’re now sort of slowly coming back into the hospitality-tourism sector.
“When Covid hit we had to think on our feet and keep things moving through and once we at least opened back up to Tasmania, that’s where Cuttlefish Cruises was born. It comes under the same banner, we’ve got our Tasmanian Wild Seafood Adventures, which is our tourism offering, but then we’ve got Cuttlefish Cruises, which is our local offering. That’s what we do our corporate events on, we do private functions, we do team building on there. We do all that sort of stuff. If you can dream it up on the water, we can deliver the vessel. “That’s actually a product of Covid, and that’s been going really well. We worked through the summer seasons, but it’s honed-in our hospitality skills doing that as well as the tourism stuff on the outside. That’s been one of the positives that’s come out of it, it has given us another income stream and opened us up to more of the local market, because it’s been a little bit tricky trying to get the local market to pay the amount that it is for the seafood that they’ve got on their front already. “I mean, it does happen and any of the locals that do come on board do really enjoy it. But everyone knows someone who’s got an abalone in the freezer, or someone will catch someone crayfish throughout 11 Tasmanian Hospitality Review December/January Edition
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