FOR this month’s chapter of Meet The Maker, Southerly Magazine spoke to John King about his transition from farmer to Ace Accommodation owner, restaurateur and commercial fisherman.
Southerly Magazine: How does a shearer’s son from Ongerup suddenly find himself as a restaurateur and commercial fisherman?
John King: Yes well Dad was a shearing contractor and I shore for about seven years. I didn’t really want to be a shearer but all my mates worked in the sheds. I got married and leased 200 acres and then, three years after that, I put an offer in on 1,000 acres and got that. I was also working for my brother-in-law at the time, so farming with him. We decided to do something different and set up a contracting business and built that up. We ended up leasing a further 4,000 acres on good terms. We put in a crop which went not too bad. My marriage failed at that time but I kept the farm and the debt. Then we had the best year in 100 years. We actually had two in a row with four-tonne crops.
SM: And yet you didn’t stay farming?
JK: My accountant said the farms are in good shape, you’ll get good money for them and all your mates are down here in Albany so you should come down here and find a business. Farming might have been good if I stayed in it, but I was carrying a lot of debt because I didn’t get a farm given to me.
SM: Was there a particular strategy to this search for a suitable business?
JK: The way I ended up with Ace Accommodation was quite funny. A mate who was helping me find a business rang me up and said there was a motel for sale. I said I wasn’t buying a motel but he said I should give them a ring because it might be a good price. He gave me the number and I rang them and the lady who answered said: “Sorry we’re not for sale, but the one down the road is”. I figured I’d been given the wrong number, but about an hour later, her husband rang me back said: “We’ve just decided to retire if you want to buy it.” So we came down and had a coffee with them and he took me through. One thing I could see when I walked around was that a lot of work needed doing. That made me more interested than ever – not the actual running of the place. I just wanted to do it up. I like doing that – the same as what I did to the farm.
SM: So Ryan’s Restaurant evolved as part of the makeover?
JK: There wasn’t much of a restaurant here. I wanted to have a nice restaurant, because when I go to Perth and stay at motels I’ll sometimes just want go down to the restaurant and have a nice meal. That’s the sort of thing this didn’t have. I thought that if I could get the community to start coming in, that would sustain it, even if we were at low occupancy. Then I wanted it to be a seafood restaurant because I’ve always fished.
SM: So you were keen on fishing at Bremer Bay like so many people from that part of the world around Ongerup, Jerramungup, Dumbleyung and so on?
JK: Yes, I had a boat and used to go down there fishing. That was totally different to commercial fishing, but I like learning things, having a crack and taking a risk.
SM: What were your target species to kick off the new-look restaurant?
JK: Not just normal fish. I’m talking dhufish, nannygai, hapuka, saddleback, groper – anything really deep. The thing with dhufish, when you have a restaurant, is that you can’t usually afford to serve it. That’s why you don’t see dhufish very often. It was $40 or $50/kg, and same for nannygai, now it’s probably more. We started buying it, because I wanted nice fish and our chef said: “We can’t serve that because we’ll have to charge $50 a meal, so we’ll have to buy queeny.” The cheapest fish was queen snapper, and there’s nothing wrong with it but you can’t advertise a queeny on your board and expect people to flock in. So, I decided I’d go and catch it myself. I had to get a few licences of course, and my coxswain ticket and everything.
SM: That couldn’t have been easy?
JK: No, it took me some time. So I’ve done two courses now for my coxswain and then getting my licences to sell the fish to myself, because I sell fish back to myself. That’s how we can have any fish for a reasonable price. What we do is rotate the fish, so when saddleback’s on, or pink snappers on, that’s what will be on the menu. It’s just luck of the draw.
SM: The transition from a keen fisherman to commercial fisherman presumable required the development of a whole new skill set?
JK: Yes it did. I was lucky I’ve got plenty of mates to help me learn. One thing I did with the first boat was load it up with electronics, and that was the difference. I had a 3D map that had already been done for out deep, so I knew where all the little tiny canyons were. It did the job, and I was supplying our own fish, so that was the main thing. Then we decided to do up some rooms, so I sold the boat, started buying fish just for an interim and kept going like that for probably only a year. Then we got to a point when we had to get going again. I thought I could do it a lot better this time, so I bought an old boat which was in the right survey for what I needed. We stripped it ourselves and got it redone from the dash to the motors. We set it up for commercial fishing with better electronics and everything that I knew I needed, like lots more electric rods. And it was on a trailer, that was the biggest thing. So, now I’m more flexible because I can go to Bremer, Cheynes, or Peaceful Bay, which opened up all the new areas for me. That’s how I learned. At the start it wasn’t my main job, so it wasn’t a lot of stress if I didn’t make it out fishing because it wasn’t a full-on job. Now it’s turned into a good business.
SM: There’s only so much seafood people can eat at Ryan’s, so who do you sell to other than yourself?
JK: I’ve got 400kg of hapuka on the back of the truck right now that I’ve got to take to Great Southern Seafoods. I’ve got a good relationship with them, so I only sell to them now. I take all of what I want – dhufish, snapper and whatever we need at the time. The chef tells me if we’re getting low on something, so I can go and target different fish if we need it in the kitchen.
SM: And you’ve got the skills now to be able to target whatever you want with a sense of confidence?
JK: Reasonably. If we want to catch dhuies and pinkies, we go on the coral, whereas if you were doing it as a main business, it’s not sustainable to go on and just catch dhufish and snapper. You’d go broke pretty quick.
SM: Do Great Southern Seafoods take the same view when they’re talking to you about where they’re at in terms of their supplies and what they need?
JK: They will take as much as we can catch, and it’s good that I only sell to them now because it’s just too hard going around to fish and chip shops, measuring out five nannygais. I’ve got the motel to run as well so I haven’t got time to do that.
SM: Do you process your own fish for the restaurant?
JK: I fillet ours myself, and that brings the cost down too. I pay more money per kilo, but it allows the restaurant to sell it at portions and still make money, so we don’t go backwards and diners get the variety. We wanted our little sign out the front to tell people driving past, which has worked an absolute treat. People tell me that they look at it all the time to see what I’ve caught, so that’s been a real success.
SM: How has the business coped with the COVID-19 restrictions?
JK: We’ve only got one chef on JobKeeper and one waitress, so to open the restaurant we need at least two chefs plus more staff in here. In the middle of winter it’s not worth it at the moment. We’d go backwards. We’ll reopen at the start of September.
SM: Has JobKeeper been good for staff retention in other parts of the business?
JK: We’re lucky. We’ve retained heaps of staff and hardly had any turnover staff at all. We’ve used that time very well. We’ve pulled all the old rooms apart, scrubbed them and set them all up. We’ve just finished nine brand-new rooms which we did ourselves. We’ve got 32 brand-new rooms now.
SM: Have there been changes in the kitchen as well?
JK: Our chef, Richard Serrano, is actually quite a handyman. He’s remodelled the benches to the way he wants to work when it opens again. So, I left him with that. He’d also come down and help me in the rooms, so that was his way of making his hours up. The beauty of this JobKeeper is everyone stays together.
SM: Tell us about the woman behind the fisherman.
JK: My partner, Karen Wolfe, has been with me from the start when I first bought this, and now she runs the office. I definitely couldn’t do it without her. Having her here allows me to do the fishing really, because if I didn’t have anyone back here, I couldn’t go all the time. She’s quite pivotal to everything. She runs the office and does all the marketing and stuff. That’s why we’ve gone alright.
SM: COVID seems to have hit just when you were building up some momentum across the business.
JK: When I first bought this place we had 25 buses a year booked in because we’ve got a big dining room area. Then it was 35 last year. Karen started advertising over east and we had 50 booked in for this year. That’s massive, but pretty much all got cancelled apart from a couple of buses coming through from around WA. So that was a bit of a downer.
SM: But you’ll be ready for them for when they come next?
JK: And that’s the attitude we’ve taken. One of the staff, she used to be the head cleaner, she does all the gardening now and is making sure the eveything is nice for spring when hopefully everything gets back to sort of normal.
SM: Will we see anything new on the Ryan’s menu?
SM: We’ve got a new menu for when we open again, and there’s more seafood on that. And there’ll be more specials regarding seafood. Our chef really loves seafood, so we keep putting more and more seafood on our menu. Albany didn’t have an actual seafood restaurant, so that was the goal, and it’s been good.
SM: How’s the fishing been?
JK: Pretty good, pretty steady. We haven’t got the restaurant open but we do room service most nights. So we still go through fish, but not as much. More gets sold at the moment.
SM: You’re not going out as frequently or the same amount, but selling more to Great Southern Seafoods?
JK: I’m probably going out more. The last two days were average but we still went out and went alright.
SM: Are you seeing patterns in fish location and numbers?
JK: I keep a log book which coordinates where I went, what I caught that day, what the weather was like, what the moon was doing and so on. I’ve done that for two and a half years now. There’s lots of patterns. I know the dates when things will start biting and where they might be spawning and where to go. For instance, when things spawn is quite important, so I just look through my book on this month and see what I catch. It’s good fun learning something different. I enjoy it of course, and my mates like to come out and help.
SM: Do you have regular staff on the boat?
JK: Darren Michael is my main deckhand, and then a heap of other mates, mostly from the golf club, have got licences. I think, over the last two years, I’ve had to go out on my own a couple of times. I have been on my own out deep, but it’s only happened once when it was a really nice day and I ended up getting 170kgs.
SM: Do you have some good toys on the new boat?
JK: I’ve got this thing on the front of the boat, a Minn Kota. I’ve only just got it put on. It’s just a little electric motor and that’s done really well for the fishing. And this is what I like doing – trying to innovate and trying to get an edge. This little motor helps us to sit over schools of nannygai or hapuka so you don’t drift. It holds you within a metre, even on my big boat, for five or six hours if I wanted it to. So we just go from spot to spot and it helps us minimise the time we need to be out there.
SM: At this point we always ask a producer what ideal meal they would have, featuring their own produce.
JK: Saddleback cod in our chef’s beer batter. That’s my favourite. That’s the best fish, I’ll tell you.