COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 5
January 2008
RI’s ‘Eliminator’ net team wins Smart Gear prize
SEATTLE, WA – “The Eliminator,” an innovative net shown to reduce bycatch of cod in the haddock bottom trawl fishery that was designed and tested by Rhode Island gear experts and fishermen, was named the grand prizewinner of the 2007 Smart Gear international competition.
The award was presented by competition sponsor World Wildlife Fund (WWF) during the Pacific Marine Expo conference and trade show held Nov. 15-17 in Seattle.
The net beat out more than 70 other contenders from 22 countries and won the design and research team a $30,000 prize.
Back in 2004, Rhode Island fishermen Jim O’Grady, Phil Ruhle Sr., and Phil Ruhle Jr. approached Jon Knight of Superior Trawl in Wakefield, RI with an idea for an experimental net that targeted haddock while reducing retention of other bycatch species, especially cod.
Knight met with Rhode Island Sea Grant fisheries extension specialists Laura Skrobe and David Beutel at the University of Rhode Island (URI) and, together with the three fishermen, they decided to work as a team.
Net specs
According to an article Skrobe and Beutel wrote for Commercial Fisheries News (see CFN December 2006), the Eliminator works on the same concept as the separator trawl by exploiting a key difference in fish behavior – haddock rise when they encounter a trawl, while other groundfish dive toward the bottom.
Traditional groundfish nets are required to have 6" mesh throughout the net, while this trawl has large meshes – 240 centimeters (cm) or about 94.8" – that allow the groundfish to escape.
The upper section meshes quickly graduate from 240 cm wings to 80 cm (about 32") in the square and 20 cm (about 8") in the first belly. The back bellies of the net are all made from 6" webbing, the same as a traditional groundfish trawl.
A three-panel kite provides vertical lift to between five and six fathoms of headrope height. This height, along with meshes on the top of the net that are smaller than the bottom meshes, captures the haddock while helping other groundfish escape.
In a follow-up interview, Beutel pointed out that the net was actually a modified squid net without the line.
“The Eliminator is not a new invention. It’s just a new application of a standard squid net with an adjusted footrope to handle hard bottom,” he said.
The Eliminator’s rockhopper sweep is different in that it uses bigger disks – 16" in the middle and 14" on the wings – with 2' spaces between them.
Practical use
According to Phil Ruhle Sr., the whole research-end of the project went along like clockwork.
“This highlights the way cooperative research is supposed to work,” he said. “We understood the need for this and came up with the idea. We went to URI and to Jon Knight at Superior Trawl, who designed and built the net. And then we went out and tested it.”
Ruhle said all of the industry/Sea Grant partners appreciated the help and input provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Cooperative Research Partners Program (CRPP), which is overseen by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The science center sent representatives out on both participating industry boats – the Sea Breeze and the Iron Horse.
“After they saw the results from the first trip, they were very eager to help move this project along,” said Ruhle.
Not that the project didn’t encounter its fair share of obstacles. The biggest was probably the dismantling of the original plan to conduct the research under B-days-at-sea.
But once the team learned that participating fishermen would be forced to burn valuable A-days to conduct the research, the project was restructured so that vessels could sell the catch and deposit the proceeds into the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation of Rhode Island (see CFN June 2006). The accumulated earnings from the project then were used to fund the fourth leg of the work.
“The foundation was a great help to us,” said Ruhle.
Ruhle also said that, overall, the project clicked right along from its original concept through the submission of a final report to the New England Fishery Management Council’s research steering committee.
Not legal yet
“The project had great results and it went through the system the way it was supposed to,” Rhule said. “There were no shortcuts involved.”
Then, he said, “Everything came to a stop.”
Although NMFS was in the process at press time of adopting new gear standards for the Eastern US/Canada Haddock Special Access Program and the regular B-days-at-sea program, the changes – and the expected approval of the Eliminator – weren’t likely to be implemented until at least early 2008.
“We spend millions of dollars on cooperative research, and then we can’t practically put into place the work we’ve done,” said Ruhle, who stressed that this was his single frustration with the otherwise successful project.
“We came up with this net so we could catch haddock on Georges. It shouldn’t take a-year-and-a-half to get a gear approved that’s been tested and proven to work,” he said.
Smaller boats
While the Eliminator was designed for and tested by bigger boats in the 600-to-750-horsepower (hp) range, the CRPP has awarded another grant to Skrobe, Beutel, and Knight to test lower horsepower versions of the net.
“The hope is to enable smaller boats to use some kind of Eliminator,” Beutel said.
The plan is to test two sizes: one for 400-550 hp boats; and another for 250-400 hp boats.
Beutel said the team is looking for fishermen with boats of that horsepower capacity to try out the nets. Trials probably will be conducted in the fall, he said.
In addition to the attention the net received from the Smart Gear competition award, a group of gear researchers and fishermen from the United Kingdom (UK) recently purchased an Eliminator net.
Beutel said the group intended to test the gear in UK waters to see if it will reduce unintended cod and flatfish bycatch.
Runners up
Three other gear designs received runner-up awards in the Smart Gear competition.
The “Nested Cylinder Bycatch Reduction Device” was designed to reduce the bycatch of juvenile red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl fishery.
The device is made up of two sleeves – a small cylinder, painted white and brightly illuminated, nested inside a larger outer cylinder painted black on the downstream end.
Red snapper instinctively avoid the bright light of the smaller cylinder and swim into the dark cylinder, which leads to an escape opening.
The “Traffic Cone” is a device that warns seabirds away from contact with warp cables. Each orange plastic cone measures 1 meter high and is 10 cm in diameter at one end and 20 cm in diameter at the other end.
The cones open in half for easy attachment to each warp cable from the deck. The size and high color contrast of the cones alert the birds to the dangers of the cables so they avoid them.
The final prize was a special award to a UK entry. The “Passive Porpoise Deterrent” is a lower cost alternative to traditional pinger devices used on gillnets.
The winning design combines passive acoustic reflectors with a small number of active pingers to produce enough echolocation feedback to the animals so they know to avoid the gear.
More detailed information on all the prizewinners is available online at <www.worldwildlife.org>. Search at the top of the page for “Smart Gear 2007.”
To talk to Beutel or Skrobe about upcoming trials of Eliminator nets for smaller boats, contact them as follows: Dave Beutel, phone (401) 874-7152 or e-mail <dbeutel@uri.edu>; or Laura Skrobe, phone (401) 874-9360 or e-mail <lskrobe@uri.edu>.
Lorelei Stevens
Janice M. Plante
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
