From the water, the double-cone-shape cage is aglow like a colossal Chinese lantern, with shimmering streams of sunlight and glinting forms of darting fish. Rather than taking Sims’s word for it, I put swim fins on my feet and a snorkel around my neck, high-step to the edge of his small service boat, and take the plunge. The seven submerged paddocks, each one as big as a high school gymnasium, are anchored within rapid currents that sweep away the waste, which is quickly diluted to harmless levels in the open waters.
At offshore sites such as Kona Blue Water Farms, pollution is not an issue, Sims explains. Too often old-style coastal farms, scorned as eyesores and ocean polluters, exude enough fish excrement and food scraps to cloud the calm, shallow waters, triggering harmful algal blooms or snuffing out sea life underneath the pens. Their offshore locations offer a distinct advantage over the thousands of conventional fish farms-flotillas of pens that hug the coastline. Tucked discretely below the waves, Sims’s farm is one of 20 operations worldwide that are trying to take advantage of the earth’s last great agricultural frontier: the ocean.
But rather than saddling a horse like the Australian sheep drovers he grew up with, Sims dons a snorkel and mask to wrangle his herd: 480,000 silver fish corralled half a mile off the Kona coast of Hawaii’s Big Island.
Neil Sims tends his rowdy stock like any devoted farmer.
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