40 years of cracking jokes: Vernon fish market up for sale

It's impossible to buy anything from Bob Gibson without him telling you a joke, a story or some kind of fable. With his handlebar moustache, booming voice and personality to match, every customer will walk out of his fishmongers with more than just a bag of fresh seafood or fish. "I try and make everybody have a laugh because even more we need to have a laugh these days," Bob told iNFOnews.ca. "I don't care how you walk in the door, it's how you walk out the door." Now, after 42 years of running Vernon's A Fine Kettle O' Fish with his wife Kathy Gibson, the couple have put the business on the market. Bob won't divulge his age and is adamant he's not retiring. "Kathy and I have had the store for 43 years and I just want to take her on a date and go do some things that we can do together," Bob said. "And also to take the time to travel across the country and see some people that we've been doing business with all these years we have never met." Hundreds of kilometres from the sea, Vernon is not the obvious choice for a high-end, incredibly well-stocked fish market and deli, but Bob and Kathy have made it work and it's become an institution over the decades. "Fish has been in all my life," Bob. "My first memory... is actually catching a fish." A former commercial diver Bob said he'd worked in kitchens before he and Kathy opened the store in 1983. "As young kids, we just opened up this store, and we've been well accepted every year," he said. The original store was a couple of doors down, and in 2000 the couple moved into the current much larger location. The extra room meant they could not just sell fish, but also prepare food. Their deli section offers everything from crab cakes and coconut shrimp to Thai shrimp spring rolls and chipotle salmon bacon oysters. There are also freezers piled high with seafood ranging from whole crayfish to Alaska king crab. In recent years they've started fresh sushi, and fish and chips. If there's anything fresh left at the end of the day, it can be turned into something else. Bob says he's got waste down to about 1.5%. Fish arrives whole and needs filleting and deboning, it's a skill and art he and Kathy mastered years ago. The couple also has a farm outside Armstrong where they grow a lot of the produce that heads to the store. While the logistics of selling a product with a short sell-buy date hundreds of kilometres from the sea sounds complicated, Bob says he has a system. He has longstanding relationships with all his suppliers who give him first dibs. He says he can get fresh seafood from the East Coast quicker than Vancouver Island sometimes. "When you've been doing business with people for a long time that respect what you do and they look after you," he said. At 11 a.m. in the morning, the store has a steady stream of customers, and Bob chats and jokes with all of them. Anyone who has ever been in will have likely noticed the store never appears to be quiet, and Bob and Kathy are always behind the counter. Bob credits the success of the business as having the owners front and centre. The majority of customers are regulars and he knows them. As an elderly lady leaves the store and Bob says she comes in a couple of times a week and has done for the last 20 years. Outside of the sheer array of products on offer, there is also something unusual about A Fine Kettle O' Fish – it doesn't have the normal fishmonger smell. "We clean for four hours a day," Bob says proudly. So after more than 40 years of being the public face of A Fine Kettle O' Fish will he miss it when the business sells? "Our days are full and I don't really expect slowing down," he said. "Telemark skiing in deep powder and fly fishing are my passion." The business is up for sale for $495,000, which while a lot of money, isn't much for an entire life's work. "It's priced to sell," he said, adding that it has to go to the right person. And until that right person takes over, you can guarantee that Bob and Kathy will be standing behind the counter, as Bob cracks jokes in the same way he's done six days a week for more than 40 years. For more information about A Fine Kettle O' Fish go here https://www.finekettleofish.ca/ . To contact a reporter for this story, email Ben Bulmer mailto:bbulmer@infonews.ca  or call (250) 309-5230 or email the editor mailto:news@infonews.ca . You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom mailto:tips@infonews.ca  and be entered to win a monthly prize draw. We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here https://infotel.ca/newsletter .