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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 3
November 2005
Expanded fisheries observer program here to stay
FALMOUTH, MA - The watching eyes, the extra person squeezing in on board. Most fishermen in the Northeast know the feeling, and they better get used to it because fisheries observers are here to stay.
On Oct. 12, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Science Center Fisheries Sampling Branch held an open house to allow visitors to tour its new 13,000-square-foot observer program and training facility sited in a Falmouth industrial park.
Prior to the move, the program had outgrown its office in the science center to the point where it had spread into three additional satellite offices in the Woods Hole area, including one in the basement of a church.
The reason for the sudden growth in the program is simple. Observer coverage in the Northeast region has more than quadrupled in the last four years.
Fisheries Sampling Branch Chief David Potter oversees the observer program. In 2001, he explained, the program employed 12 observers, who put in about 1,800 sea days, and had six people processing observer-collected data.
Now in 2005, the Northeast program employs 103 observers, plus five area coordinators and five field coordinators, and another 42 people – in-house NMFS staffers and contractors – to process the data collected.
Over the previous 12 months, the region’s observers had logged 11,830 sea days on board fishing vessels from Maine to North Carolina.
Amendment 13
The huge increase in people and sea days is directly tied to regulatory actions. In addition to long-standing requirements to place observers on vessels to monitor interactions under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act, as well as the 10 percent observer requirement in the access area scallop fishery, last year’s implementation of Amendment 13 to the groundfish plan vastly expanded observer requirements to document catch and bycatch.
As part of the court case that resulted in Amendment 13, NMFS was ordered to increase observer coverage of groundfish trips to a minimum of five percent of days-at-sea or more if statistically necessary.
And, at the insistence of NMFS, a number of fisheries, including those in the US/Canada Management Area, the Regular B-Day Pilot Program, and Special Access Programs (SAPs), have a target coverage level of 50 percent of all trips.
That means an individual fisherman participating in any of these fisheries can expect to be asked to carry an observer on half of his trips in order to monitor catch and discard amounts and determine when hard quotas have been taken.
Witch hunt?
Vessels are required to take observers when asked and most fishermen do so without complaint. According to NMFS, only a fraction of vessels in the Northeast fail to comply with the observer requirement by refusing observers outright, and those vessels are reported to law enforcement officials.
Most fishermen and observers get along all right, too, each respecting the fact that the other has a job to do.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t questions about the level of coverage, both on an individual boat basis and fishery wide.
Barnegat Light, NJ fisherman Kevin Wark fishes in the Mid-Atlantic mixed gillnet fishery for monkfish, weakfish, croakers, and other species. Over the years, he has taken out a lot of observers, many of them new to the job, believing he’s doing his part to demonstrate that the gillnet fleet has nothing to hide.
“At first we thought it would be a short-term thing, but the pressure has been stepped up every year to more and more trips,” he said. “We can’t seem to satisfy them. I almost feel like we’re in a witch hunt and we’ll never be able to get out of it.”
Permanent force
It turns out Wark is probably right about not being able to get out of it. Observer program officials explained that the data observers collect has become extremely important to both the fisheries assessment and management processes.
“For fisheries where we have a bycatch issue, we will always rely on observer data,” said Lisa Desfosse, leader of the NMFS National Observer Program. Desfosse, formerly Lisa Kline, previously was the ASMFC director of research and statistics and helped create the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program,
The Fisheries Sampling Branch web site puts it this way: “To get an accurate picture of the status of a fish stock, and the influence of fishing on the ecosystem, it is important to gather biological information not only about what and how much is landed and removed from the ecosystem, but also about what is not landed.”
Nationwide, more than 500 observers put in 63,000 sea days on 42 fisheries during Fiscal Year (FY) 2005. Of those fisheries, 26 have “adequate” coverage and 16 have only “baseline” coverage that will be expanded over time, Desfosse explained.
FY 2005 funding for the national program was $27 million plus another $15 million paid by industry, mostly in the North Pacific groundfish program. NMFS hopes to convince Congress to nearly double fisheries observer funding by 2012, she said.
Potter agrees that carrying observers is just a fact of life these days.
“The only way to collect data on discards is to put humans on board,” he said.
NMFS scientists are “required by law to come up with assessments and if they don’t know (the status of fish stocks), they’ll be conservative,” Potter continued. “These fisheries-dependent data will always be in the best interest of fishermen. The way I see it, if the real facts are going to put you out of business, I’d bet most people would say you should be out of business because you’re hurting the resource.”
Who does what
NMFS draws up the sea day schedule that determines how many observer days are allocated to each fishery.
Potter explained that he looks at the available funding and determines the total number of observer days the program can afford. Factoring observer pay and administrative expenses, it costs about $1,200 per day to put an observer on a fishing vessel, he said.
The available days are then allocated among the various fisheries based on the needs identified by fishery managers and scientists for biological information about the catch, the quantity and species composition of discards, marine mammal and endangered species interactions, and economic information.
AIS Inc. also has a number of staff members working out of the new NMFS facility in Falmouth. AIS is the private company under contract with NMFS to recruit observers and get them into the field and onto vessels to meet the sea day schedule.
When fishermen in special access programs comply with the mandatory 72-hour call-in notice to say they’re making a trip, they talk to an AIS person.
Who are they?
NMFS is responsible for training all new hires, according to Potter.
Many fishermen have reported having varied experiences with observers, ranging from the adept person who fits in well on the boat and with the crew to the greenhorn who spends the trip sick below deck.
So who are these people?
According to Potter, most of the people that AIS recruits are young marine science majors fresh out of college looking for their first job.
And at first glance, the job looks pretty good to someone who enjoys going to sea. The starting salary is $185 per sea day along with health and dental insurance, two weeks vacation, 10 holidays, four sick days, and other benefits. In addition, NMFS pays AIS a $100 incentive bonus for high-quality data, $85 of which AIS turns over to the observer, Potter said.
Observer candidates are required to have a BS degree in biology or marine science. Fishermen interested in the job but who don’t have the college degree can still apply.
Potter said sea and/or fisheries experience is considered desirable and he does have the authority to waive the degree requirement, although it’s there to ensure that applicants have experience with basic scientific method.
Pay, training
All new-hires participate in a paid ($12/hour), three-week training course at the new Falmouth facility. The instructors include NMFS staff plus outside experts.
The training course covers species identification, biological sampling techniques, and data recording, with students participating in lab work to learn how to properly take samples from fish, marine mammals, and sea turtles.
There is also extensive training in safety practices and even training in how to behave on a fishing boat.
“How to stow your stuff, how to talk to the captain,” Potter said, offering a few examples.
After completing their basic training and passing four exams, the new observers must go out on four, one-day training trips on real fishing vessels contracted for that purpose before being assigned to their first solo trips.
High turn-over
Even with all the training and decent base pay, the turn-over rate in the observer program is enormous – about five percent per month, according to Potter.
“We need to bring in 35-40 new observers each year to maintain our trained cadre,” he said.
For some new observers, the job just turns out to be too hard. Isolation can also be a problem since many of them, particularly those in the Mid-Atlantic, work from home and rarely see their colleagues.
Another issue is that observers only get paid when they go to sea. They often have to go out and scare up the trips themselves and the on-again, off-again nature of special access programs means that they can go for weeks, maybe even months, without getting in more than a handful of days.
“Observers are usually either overworked or underemployed,” said NMFS biologist Amy Van Atten, who sets up the boat lists.
Vessel selection process
A major concern on the mind of many fishermen is how NMFS, AIS, and individual observers make the decision to choose them to carry an observer on a particular trip.
According to a handout provided by NMFS, vessel selection procedures have been designed to adhere to a statistically sound protocol and are “fair and equitable among active vessels in a fishery.”
For example, in the groundfish fishery, NMFS takes all the landing reports recorded on vessel trip reports from the previous year and groups them into “fleet sectors” based on gear type, mesh size used, where the trip left from, and the length of the trip. This is done by quarters, meaning in groups of three months four times per year.
Every vessel that was active in a particular fleet sector during a particular time of year from which scientists and fishery managers want observer data is put into a pool and assigned a random number.
A list is then created using the random number to put vessels in order. The list goes to AIS and/or the observers who go down the list in order until they find a boat that is making a trip in the fishery NMFS wants observed.
This system is far from being a sure bet since there are a number of reasons why the top boats on the random selection list aren’t appropriate or can’t accommodate an observer. Reasons include: the observer can’t find the vessel; the observer and the boat can’t get together for logistical reasons; the vessel isn’t targeting the species and/or area of interest; the vessel isn’t fishing; or safety concerns.
For the April-June 2005 quarter, observers were able to hook up with the listed vessels only 27 percent of the time.
Fair? Effective?
There is a strong feeling among some industry people that there are fishermen out there who manipulate the system to avoid having to carry observers.
The result of avoidance can be ineffective monitoring of key quotas, early closures of vital fisheries, and a disproportion burden on the boats that play by the rules.
West Barnstable, MA fisherman Eric Hesse, who is part of the Georges Bank Cod Hook Sector, suggested that the organized nature of the sector, which has a professional manager as a point of contact, makes sector boats a ready mark.
“We’ve provided (AIS) with a target that makes it easy for them to put observers on our fleet,” he said.
Because NMFS calculates the number of trips covered on a calendar month basis, the agency tends to “front load” the number of trips covered at the beginning of the month in case weather or other problems crop up.
Coverage “is based on the number of times you go out fishing,” Van Atten said. “If you go fishing more often, chances are more of your trips are covered.”
More info
As difficult as the observer situation can be for everyone involved, people have positive things to say about the program. John Pappalardo, hook sector manager, credited NMFS, AIS, and David Potter by name as being extremely cooperative.
“They’re good people dedicated to making this work,” he said. “This is a brand new thing and it’s not going to work perfectly coming out of the box. We’ve not had an incident when a vessel wanted to go fishing and could not.”
The Fisheries Sampling Branch has much more information on the observer program on its web site at <www.nefsc.noaa.gov/femad/fishsamp/fsb>. The information there includes an updated sea day schedule, charts indicating where and how many trips were observed in a variety of fisheries, and contact information for the branch staff.
Lorelei Stevens
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