Page 113 - Bulletin 7 2003
P. 113
110
a breakwater at the Bay in 1936 to provide safe anchorage for the motorised fishing
boats (Fig. 3.22) which were the mainstay of the freezing trade, and enabled the Bay
farmers to source fish as far north as the Namaqualand coast.
The freezing enterprise was plagued by the poor and variable quality of its product,
however, costing it the French marked in 1934 and threatening the American trade
by the end of the 1930s. The Bay farmers thus sought to establish a single marketing
organisation under State aegis to protect their lucrative export markets by
guaranteeing the quality and stabilising the price of their product. The Second World
War intervened to delay this process, but in 1946 the Hout Bay farmer-freezers,
Trautman Brothers and Trans-African Fisheries, joined with the Cape Town
exporter, Stubbs Fisheries, to form South African Sea Products (SASP).
The new company bought out the old HBCC and built an ultra-modern processing
factory and new housing estate for its workers with capital from the Fisheries
Development Corporation. The State also further developed the harbour adding a
slipway, electricity supply and hard road. SASP was also awarded the lion’s share of
the frozen rock lobster export quota making Hout Bay the centre of this industry in
the post-1945 era. The Bay’s role as an industrial fishing port expanded further in the
1960s when both pelagic and trawl fish processing companies established factories
there.
By the 1970s Hout Bay’s industrial fishery was in decline as production followed the
downward trend in fish stocks. The ensuing rationalisation of the industry led to a
reduction in the number of boats and factories and, in the case of the rock lobster
fishery, a shift away from labour to capital-intensive fishing - the dinghy and ring-net
being replaced by traps and grid-sorters. The result was a steadily worsening un- and
underemployment among the Bay’s fishing labour force and a growing resort to
informal subsistence and black market fishing.
