Open_Ocean_Aquaculture

Despite these concerns, it’s clear that OOA is moving ahead. A barge carrying 20 tons of fish pellets recently made its maiden voyage out to Cates’s moi cages. Once it’s moored in place, with feeding lines attached, the barge doesn’t require a human presence. From his office on shore, Cates uses his PC to tell the barge’s computer to release the right amount of food at the right time. Cates can even monitor the operation with images beamed from cameras mounted on the barge and in the cages themselves.

Others are leaping even farther ahead, at least conceptually. Cliff Goudey, who directs the Center for Fisheries Engineering Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees OOA’s move from shallow-water anchorage to deep-water anchorage as a good first step. The next step is to let go of the anchor. “Once you free yourself from a mooring,” he explains, “all of a sudden you realize you’re no longer at the mercy of all that nature throws at you. You use the ocean currents, rather than resist them.”

Goudey has worked for years on Ocean Drifter, an untethered fish cage with a diameter three times as large as the SeaStation’s and remote-controlled thrusters to maneuver within ocean currents. Goudey envisions a flotilla of Ocean Drifters, each filled with hundreds of thousands of fingerlings in Florida and set loose in the Gulf Stream. The warm Caribbean current is like a river within the sea, carrying the cages across the North Atlantic and delivering the by-then-grown fish to markets in Europe.

For now, the largest Ocean Drifter is an 18-foot-diameter prototype whose greatest journey was inside the Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s not quite ready for prime time,” Goudey admits. But, he hastens to add, OOA “is the only way to meet future demand for seafood. And the Ocean Drifter, or something like it, is the future of open-ocean aquaculture.”

"Ocean Drifter"

Kris Holland

The past is often the best crystal ball in which to catch glimpses of the future. With this in mind, while in Hawaii, I take a day trip to a fish pond that is said to be 1,000 years old. He’eia Pond is just 14 miles from Cates’s moi cages, over the Koolau mountains on Oahu’s windward side. The first Hawaiians began building fish ponds 2,000 years ago, not long after arriving from the Marquesa Islands. In 1778, when the British explorer Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii, he found some 360 fish ponds producing nearly two million pounds of seafood. The ponds are great feats of engineering, a happy marriage of marine biology and technological skill. They are shallow, to provide the optimal amount of sunlight to grow algae for young fish to eat. And they have sluice gates—slots large enough to allow young fish in but small enough to trap them when they’ve grown, as well as to keep predators out. Behind the sluice gates are solid gates. The combination allowed workers to clean the pond by trapping water at high tide and releasing it when the tide ran out. Nearly a mile around, the 88-acre He’eia Pond is a model for sustainable aquaculture.

“Yeah, there’s a lot to the ‘old school’ ways,” says Will Ho’o’pi’i, a native Hawaiian who’s out walking his dogs when I drive up. “They raised moi in there,” he says as we look down on He’eia Pond.

Will Ho’o’pi’i in front of He’eia Pond

Osha Gray Davidson

I ask if he’s heard about the underwater cages, where 100,000 moi swim in what some think is the future of the seafood industry. No, he hadn’t heard about them, but the idea makes him smile. “It could be the future, you know,” he says, “if they do it the way the old people did.”

How was that? I ask. He looks at me for a moment as if it’s obvious. Then he gestures toward the ancient pond. “Carefully,” he says. “Very carefully.”

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