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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 7
March 2007
NE council questions VMS, days-at-sea counting
PORTSMOUTH, NH – With emotions still raw from the recent losses of the Lady of Grace and Lady Luck, the New England Fishery Management Council voted on Feb. 6 to send a letter to all vessel monitoring system (VMS) providers asking them to contact clients to explain any safety features, such as “panic buttons” or other vessel-in-distress alerts, that are available through their units.
The council’s Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) and Enforcement Committee, which had earlier in the day deliberated this issue, recommended the action.
Committee Chairman Rodney Avila of Massachusetts said, “We wanted the VMS vendors to send a letter to their clients with details of how these safety features should be used.”
According to Northeast VMS Program Manager Bill Semrau, each vendor’s features are different.
The Thrane & Thrane Inc. unit, for example, comes with a panic button that is part of the unit, while Boatracs Inc. also offers this feature as an optional addition.
Skymate Inc. at the moment has no emergency safety feature on its unit but one is in the final stages of development and might be ready for an April rollout, Semrau explained.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is in the process of approving an additional vendor, and the council agreed that this and any other “potential” vendors should receive the letter as well.
The letter will ask vendors to encourage fishermen to implement any needed procedures related to safety alerts.
DAS counting
The council reviewed several other VMS-related issues.
For one, it voted to charge its staff with developing guidelines for how VMS affects all current regulations.
Second, the council voted to send a letter to NMFS “encouraging” it to complete a still-in-development days-at-sea web site “as soon as possible.”
The web site eventually could become the primary way fishermen track their days-at-sea accounts.
But fishermen have had enough complications recently keeping tabs on days-at-sea that few seemed convinced the web site would solve their problems.
Rodney Avila tried to sum up the tracking situation this way.
“The call-in number was easy for fishermen to track. With VMS, when you cross the demarcation line, that doesn’t mean you get pinged at that time, so it’s very difficult for fishermen to calculate their days,” he said.
Gloucester groundfish fisherman Dave Marciano said, “As of Framework 42’s implementation, I have no humanly possible way to track my days-at-sea usage.”
He explained, “For trip boats it might not be a problem, but on a day boat, you do five-to-seven trips per week, and the potential loss of an hour at the beginning and/or end of each trip over months at a time (because of variations in when the vessel gets pinged) makes it impossible.”
That’s why fishermen need accurate verification from NMFS.
“We need to know in a crude form when a trip begins and ends,” he said.
Cape Cod fisherman Mike Russo also tried to drive home the importance of verification.
“No matter how many days-at-sea you’ve got, when you get to the end, every one counts,” he said. “I have a ballpark idea of what I’ve used, but at the end, that’s not good enough.”
More VMS info
Although the VMS/enforcement committee had received considerable information from NMFS about its VMS tracking operation, the council determined it needed more detailed statistics about the VMS monitoring program from May 2006 to January 2007.
The council voted to ask NMFS to produce a summary report – by vendor if possible – of “how often vessels signals are lost, the average length of lost signals, and what limitations may exist with increased use of VMS” as a tool to provide more fishery-related stock and management information.
New Hampshire council member David Goethel, who pushed hard for this action, said he wanted to know more about the system and its limitations because several of the proposed industry-initiated groundfish proposals for Amendment 16 call for beefed-up VMS monitoring components.
“A lot of the plans here depend on enhanced use of VMS. I really think this council needs to know how well the current system is working so we can guide people who have submitted proposals,” he said.
Among other VMS decisions, the council agreed to have a representative from the Mid-Atlantic council serve as a “voting” member on its VMS/enforcement committee.
Rhode Island council member Phil Ruhle emphasized that many issues – the general category scallop fishery, VMS actions, and the herring fishery to name a few – have a “major effect” on the Mid-Atlantic.
“It would be more helpful to have everyone at the table at the same time,” he said.
Janice M. Plante
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