So maybe you’ve landed on this website from some Search Engine or another.

You wanted to know something about fishing.

And you landed here.

“There are no fish here,” you say to yourself.

And you’re correct. There are no brickets of information about fish, or catching fish, or the large-scale slaughter of fish. Instead, you get some hippy penguin and some weird stories and comics … and a grazing bath?

Let me explain:

Creative Fisheries is all about the creative expression of a couple called Willem and Minette Visser. We thought the pun was funny. We’ve heard some rumours about people finding this website after googling “fisheries” looking for fish. And we’re really flattered. Just sorry that you did not find what you were looking for. I do know a little bit about fisheries, though, and I thought I’d share it here.

1. For South Africans.

For people eating fish in South Africa there is a little booklet, downloadable here, about which fisheries on our coasts are sustainable. It’s a WWF initiative. Basically, everything on the green list is good, the orange list you must really, really have a passion for but really, don’t and anything on the red list is illegal and if you see it on a menu or in a shop you must please, please let the authorities know. The SASSI ( South African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) website has a lot of information about why a certain fish is on the red or orange list, it kinda makes sense. Like prawns, there are plenty of prawns, but they way they catch it is through bottom trawling and only 20% of what they catch is edible, the rest of the little critters just get killed and thrown back. Now, if that’s not a needless waste, I don’t know what is.

2. For Internationals.

The Marine Stewardship Council was started some years ago by the I&J company and WWF to monitor fisheries all around the world. If they approve, the fishery gets to put the MSC logo on their products. Check it out – maybe your country has it, then you should really only buy seafood with the logo on, because ultimately the consumer is the one who pays for it and the strongest message is the one that a lot of closed pockets send.