The first bottom trawl survey with the new $60 million research ship, the Henry B. Bigelow, and redesigned gear has produced "higher catch rates for nearly all species" throughout Middle Atlantic and New England waters, according results newly published by the federal fisheries service.
The first published trawl survey results from the Bigelow and new trawling technology — created in a cooperative project between government and industry — are landmarks, according to Jimmy Ruhle, a commercial fisherman and industry expert in trawl gear and surveys.
Ruhle said he believed the industry will have confidence in the surveys by the 208-foot Bigelow, because of the way the trawl survey technology was developed.
"The Bigelow is using a trawl that is much more accepted by the industry," said Ruhle, who fishes from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. "We're in a new era — the Bigelow era."
"We've had a tremendous opportunity to make some changes in how we survey fish stocks," said Russell W. Brown, chief of the Ecosystem Service Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole.
"We spent half a decade studying how surveys should be done, working with gear manufacturers, and we spent 50 days at sea testing before we went to the Bigelow," Brown said. "We built a 1/7 scale model of the net and took that to a plume tank in St. Johns, Newfoundland — and (we) took stakeholders up there, and established protocols with the stakeholders."
The new ship and trawl technology traces to the infamous "Trawlgate" revelations that exposed shoddy work in 2002.
The 187-foot Albatross was retired in 2007, after 45 years of gathering trawl data hundreds of stations from Cape Hatteras, N.C., through the Gulf of Maine using a trawl net and system that Ruhle said "was the industry standard 40 years ago."
Today, he said, that net and system is not used commercially "by anybody."
"Everybody has modernized and changed their gear to have less impact on the bottom," said Ruhle.
Ruhle said three commercial companies — Commercial Trawl of Point Judith, R.I., Reidars Manufacturing of Fairhaven, and Trawlworks Inc. of Narragansett, R.I. — worked with the science center to design a better trawl system, which is widely used by the industry, giving the trawl surveys made by the Bigelow credibility.
Read the full story in the Gloucester Daily Times