Saving Seafood

STATE HOUSE NEWS: Fishing fleets turning to technology to meet monitoring mandate

June 1, 2016 โ€” New England fishermen are starting to use digital cameras to document groundfish discards and prove they are fishing within established quotas, turning to technology for a method that may prove more cost effective than hiring human monitors.

With support from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, The Nature Conservancy is overseeing a new project, which launches on Wednesday, June 1 and is being hailed as a โ€œnew era in fisheries monitoring.โ€

Up to 20 groundfishermen from the Maine Coast Community Sector and Cape Codโ€™s Fixed Gear Sector will use three to four cameras to capture fish handling activity on the decks of their vessels. After completing their trips, crews will send hard drives to third party reviewers who watch the footage and quantify the amount of discarded fish.

โ€œElectronic monitoring is the only realistic solution for the small-boat fishery,โ€ Eric Hesse, captain of the Tenacious II, of West Barnstable, said in a statement. โ€œEven if some fishermen have managed to scrape together enough daily revenue to cover the cost of human observers, it wonโ€™t take much to undo that balance.โ€

In December 2015, the non-profit Cause of Action announced a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the federal mandate requiring them to carry at-sea monitors on their vessels during fishing trips and to soon begin paying the cost of hosting the federal enforcement contractors. The suit was filed by Northeast Fishery Sector 13, which represents fishermen from Massachusetts to North Carolina. Cause of Action estimates the cost of human monitors at $710 per day.

Read the full story at Wicked Local

Fishermen look to replace human monitors with cameras

April 4, 2016 โ€” The program, slated to begin next month, will include about 20 boats, roughly 10 percent of the regionโ€™s active groundfishing fleet, and will require fishermen to use sophisticated software, maintain cameras through the harsh conditions at sea, and submit to constant electronic scrutiny.

That has made some fishermen, who say their boats are like homes, uneasy.

They worry about losing their privacy and whether the footage could become public.

โ€œOur bathrooms are buckets out on deck. I do not want some person counting how much toilet paper I use when I go to the head,โ€ said David Goethel, who fishes cod out of Hampton, N.H.

Goethel sued NOAA last year for requiring fishermen to assume the costs of the observer program, which he said were too expensive and would put many of his colleagues out of business. The agency had previously covered the costs, but officials said they could no longer afford to subsidize the $3 million program.

See the full story at the Boston Globe