A seafood shortage has seen wholesale prices rise ahead of Good Friday, one of the busiest times of the year.
Warrnambool's Allfresh Seafood have put on extra employees and its team has started work at the crack of dawn this week to process and fillet fish, much of it caught out of Portland, in time for Easter.
Manager Michael Murphy said the prices were "through the roof" and while some seafood, like Tasmanian salmon was hard to source, other fish were available.
"There's not a great deal of supply so that's forcing prices through the roof," Mr Murphy said. "Normally they go up marginally at Easter due to demand and then there's the fact that the supply's not great.
"A lot of it's gone up $10 a kilo, prawns went through the roof at Christmas and they've stayed up."
He said it was hard to get gummy, with fishers selling their fish quota to overseas customers during COVID-19, making it hard for local stores to now meet customer demand.
He said for the past month, Tasmanian salmon, which is its biggest seller, was in short supply and he'd heard the popular fish was also being sent overseas.
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"They're supplying them before they supply us," he said. "It's gone up and we just can't get it. We used to sell tonnes and tonnes of salmon."
Mr Murphy said there were plenty of other seafood options available.
He said Easter ling was in demand, blue grenadier and flathead were very popular and there was lots of orange roughy. While salmon is limited, he said there's plenty of oysters, prawns and crayfish.
"The customers will still buy," he said. "Most of the time it's fairly reasonably priced but since Christmas there's been an increase.
"We'll get here Thursday morning and they'll be lined up here at six o'clock."
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Most of our fish comes from Portland trawlers, straight off the boat, straight here and we process it. That's made it hard to get variety. They can't work it out, the waters have been nice and warm.
