Born to the land, lived for the sea

Brendon Burns

Jim Jessep was born into a family working hill country 50km inland, but his heart was always set on a life at sea.

Jim’s family, farming near Lake Waikaremoana, had a launch there and he loved the water. At 16, he passed entrance exams for NZ Navy officer training at Dartmouth only to fail the medical.

When he and wife Fran married, they occupied a cottage on the farm. Fran taught at the nearby native school and their three sons Jim, Dave and Ben, attended the local school. When his father passed, Jim reluctantly took over the farm.

“I used to wake up every morning and shudder at what I had to do,” he recalls.

In 1981, Jim and Fran, with a 25% partner, bought a mussel farm with four longlines at Fairy Bay in Pelorus Sound and soon moved to Blenheim. The mussels were being sold to McFarlanes for its Seatone mussel powder product.

“Ten days after we bought the farm, McFarlanes, which had been advertising the product as curing arthritis, was shut down from sales by the US Government. We didn’t sell a mussel for two years.”

The marine farm purchase included shares in a Havelock processing factory which went belly up. Sanford bought this in 1986, and things started to come right.

In 1989, Jim became President of the Marine Farming Association. After some tough times he promised his colleagues, they’d have Mercedes by the end of the next year.

“I bought three Matchbox Mercedes and gave them to executive members. I said: I don’t believe in broken promises.”

He stood down as president in 1993 and resumed from 1994-2000. With initially no staff at MFA, he attended all the hearings of the first Marlborough Sounds Resource Management Plan. The MFA gained spat catching and growing areas in the Sounds.

“Suddenly we became financial.” Jim steered the industry through its first biotoxin crisis in early 1993 which saw hundreds of people laid off. Shellfish toxin testing for export at that time involved Government scientists feeding mussels to three mice. “If one died, your mussels were ok but not if there were two dead.”

The MFA and industry worked to develop what became the Marlborough Shellfish Quality Programme in 2008, Fran got a QSM for services to the Marlborough community while Jim was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to marine farming and the community.

Now 83, he says he’s loved every minute of his life based around the Sounds. “The people in the marine farming industry are just great.”