How many places can you sink your teeth into a beautiful fresh seafood platter while a trawler with the latest catch is unloading behind you?
Well that’s just what you’ll experience at Bird’s Fish Bar in Bowen, one of the finest fish and chip shops on the Whitsundays Coast.
The Bouwer family own the seafood shop as well as Bowen Fisherman’s Seafood Company. Their boats have been harvesting these waters for 35 years.
Brett Bouwer, affectionately known as “Bird”, is a third-generation fisherman.
For Brett, making sure locals can feast on the finest of Tiger Prawns and other seafood until the end of time is a priority. So how do you do that?
Well, each trawler is measured in “Effort Units” which take into account the boat’s size, catch rate and environmental impact.
“One boat has 40 effort units is classed as a 40-effort unit boat, well the one that’s an 80-effort unit boat will probably catch twice of what he’s catching. And so, they split the coast into about 5 sections and they’ve allocated to say we can use so many effort units each year in each section and once those effort units are used up that’s it, that sections stops for the year.” Brett explained.
It’s not just the seafood industry that’s booming in Bowen, it also produces the largest winter crops of fruit and vegetables in Australia!
In the Bowen ‘food bowl’, growers are using new technology to make farming super-efficient and sustainable.
Luke from NQ AeroVation has a flying farmhand, a drone which he affectionately refers to as “Stinger”.
We could drone on and on about Stinger’s many talents. Like surveying, mapping, even releasing “good” bugs into the environment.
“So the big thing is we’re integrating pest management so helping growers use less chemicals which is less run off to the reefs,” Luke explained. “The bugs are coming in and doing the jobs where the chemical can’t.”
The future of farming relies on more than clever technology though. Teaching kids the importance of sustainability gives Belinda and Michelle from Stackelroth Farms a major buzz.
As well as producing honey, there’s plenty more coming out of the farm too like tomatoes, and not just red ones either.
“We’ve also got yellow and orange tomatoes,” said Michelle.
“We live in the best place,” she continued. “You can’t get better than north Queensland. Can’t get better than the healthy fresh fruit and vegetables that we’ve got here.
To plan a visit of your own to the gorgeous Bowen and Whitsundays, head to the Tourism Whitsundays website.
