<Begin Segment 25>

TI: Now talk about your role, I mean what type of changes did you make to increase the business?

AO: Well, it's not my role as such because the main thing is I have a good management team. And they're the ones because by the time I got involved, you know, it's hard work, like my son, I have my two sons involved, too. But my son leaves the house at three, three-thirty in the morning and he doesn't come home until six-thirty, seven, seven-thirty at night. And all of our management crew for... see our general manager, the assistant manager, and the mid management group members, you see, the boats start unloading the catches, our long line boats. Start unloading their catches and the catches could run between 40,000 pounds for a smaller catch or up to 70, 80,000 pounds per boat. So depending on the size of the catch and depending on the order in which they return to port, they start unloading the boats maybe twelve midnight because our auction starts at five-thirty in the morning, sharp. So they start unloading the boats about midnight, they unload it, brought to a weigh station, each tuna or each swordfish or whatever is weighed, labeled, put on pallets and put on a block. But when you figure you got thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty thousand pounds of fish, that's a lot of fish going through. So they start the procedure maybe about twelve o'clock midnight, auction started at five-thirty sharp, and it just keeps on going until every piece of fish is sold and removed from the premises. So that takes time and so then the bookkeeping work that's done since because of the sale, by computers they go to the office and the work is done and the boats usually ask our company to... of course we deduct our commission, we deduct, they deduct the cost of the fuel, the food, the ice and whatever else, the repairs of the vessel and then they tell us what shares the boat owner gets and the rest we split up the crew and we do all the bookkeeping work for them. And the final proceeds and we even make out the individual checks to the individual fishermen. And they all get paid that very day you see, the sale is made.

TI: Wow, so you do a lot of work.

AO: We do a lot of work.

TI: So it wasn't just like giving one big check, you do all that calculations?

AO: No, we do all that, yes, correct.

TI: So that by the end of the day everything is all taken care of.

AO: It's all taken care of as far as the boats are concerned.

TI: And for tax reasons, everything, it makes it a lot easier for everyone 'cause everything is done.

AO: Correct, yes. That's why they hold us in high respect because we do all that and on top of that as far as the sales that are made or the purchases made by the middlemen, it is our responsibility to collect from them. The boat owners, they have gotten their money already so it's our responsibility to collect from the middlemen that bought all that fish.

TI: Now is that difficult sometimes?

AO: Sometimes it gets but we have to keep on the ball all the time, otherwise we cannot survive.

TI: Especially during these difficult economic times.

AO: Correct.

TI: Where they think they can sell it and if they can't sell it, then they don't get the money and so they have hard times too.

AO: That's what we want to make sure that these people are a good people, substantially, financially, you know, responsible and everything else. That's our job.

TI: And so to be successful it's really trusting or finding good people to work with, I mean if you have good buyers, good fishermen, then everything works well.

AO: Correct. And we have to get good people too. We have to get a good management team because like I said, they start work early, they do a lot of hard work, they're very responsible and we still, you know, they have their own families to look after too. And we work six days a week, Monday through Saturday. Sunday is the only day they don't work.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.