Want local, sustainable fish? Join the club.

If you send Shaun Strobel a cheque, he'll promise to go fishing this summer. While it may not be the most convincing sales pitch, it's exactly how Strobel started Skipper Otto's Wild BC Salmon, Vancouver’s first community supported fishery.

“The first cheques were a surprise. Really, somebody just sent us money so that we could go fishing,” says Strobel, a former teacher who quit his job three years ago in an effort to keep his father Otto’s small fishing boat in the water. “It’s important that we’re all in it together, producers and consumers. To see people acknowledging that with their money and trust is quite rewarding.

Trust of this magnitude is a foreign concept to many of today’s consumers, but the model is based on existing community agriculture programs; it establishes a commitment between food producers and a community of members who buy shares upfront and receive an ongoing supply of fresh, sustainable food. Going into his third season in 2011, Strobel says they have some 250 customers and are hoping to cap membership at 300 this summer.

While Strobel’s business is an extension of a family fishery established some 40 years ago–his wife helps run the business when she's not teaching and his 70-year-old father Otto still skippers the flagship–it’s also one hip to today’s social media world. During the summer’s fishing season, those manning the three-boat fleet write blogs and tweets when within cell range to keep customers informed and let them know when to bring coolers to the docks for a portion of their shares.

In the winter, Strobel is a monthly presence at Vancouver’s farmers market, which provides a venue to sell surplus catch and drum up new members for next season. “We’ve still got a couple hundred frozen sockeye,” he says. “Fillets as well and we made quite a bit into lox.”

Strobel says setting a fair price is tough, given the need to cover all their fishing, maintenance and logistics costs, hammer out a modest profit and satisfy his members. In the end he charges roughly $7 a pound for sockeye fresh from the ocean, a price that’s competitive in the market and still guarantees fishermen at least $20 per fish.

“We planned it out so that in a worst-case scenario, it would mean no loss,” Strobel says. “But it also guarantees we’re not going to get rich.”

At those prices, a $250-share gets members at least 35 pounds of sockeye, more if they choose to mix up their orders with pinks, chums and other salmon the fishers catch on their long hauls through Johnstone Strait or Barklay Sound.

One of Strobel’s first customers was Herb Barbolet, founder of local food security advocacy group Farm Folk City Folk and associate with the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at SFU. “The quality is extraordinary that we get from Captain Otto,” he says. “He’s fishing in pristine waters.”

But it’s more than a love of salmon that keeps Barbolet coming back. “I see what’s been happening to the fishing fleet over the years,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking, the number of fishers who have sold their boats.”

Barbolet sees the community supported model as a way for small producers to stay afloat in a global fish market he says is blind to the negative externalities it dismisses.

“Because of peak everything and climate chaos, it’s very easy to see that we’re in trouble down the line,” he says. “The community supported fishery is one more way in which we can provide for ourselves and get closer to the producer.”