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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 9
May 2007
VMS declaration hard for day-boat fishermen
MYSTIC, CT – A March 7 permit holder letter reminding fishermen to declare a vessel monitoring system (VMS) activity code prior to sailing on each trip has caused considerable consternation, particularly among day-boat fishermen who keep their vessels on moorings and don’t have shore power.
“When it’s 5° below outside, the computer’s at 5° below. It grinds a little and makes noises, but the screen doesn’t come on,” said David Goethel of New Hampshire, who brought the issue to a head at the New England Fishery Management Council’s April 10-12 meeting here.
As a mooring-based, day-boat fisherman himself who had been receiving numerous phone calls from similar worried fishermen, Goethel said, “You’re asking people to do something they cannot do. I can’t send you a code when the computer is cold.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is working on the problem and investigating alternatives with its Office for Law Enforcement, but it quickly became clear that finding a solution acceptable to both NMFS and fishermen would take some doing.
The trip-by-trip declaration isn’t new, but previously, NMFS was more lenient in enforcing the rule. It allowed vessels to leave port under the same VMS code selected for the previous trip.
But many fishermen simply forgot to send in new codes when they changed fishing areas or activities and, according to NMFS, this was beginning to make the VMS information “unreliable.”
Multiple problems
Furthermore, many fishermen continue to struggle to get the codes straight and punch in the wrong ones, which further complicates data collection.
“We have so much misreporting now, and for this information to be usable, we need to be getting accurate declarations for each trip so we know what people are doing,” said NMFS Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul.
Goethel said the requirement to send in new declarations for each trip wouldn’t solve the miscoding problem.
“They’ll just be miscoding on a daily basis,” he said. “The whole fleet shouldn’t be seriously inconvenienced at worse and, for small boats, put out of business in the winter because a few people can’t push the right buttons.”
Message delays
Another problem is that fishermen at times experience significant delays in receiving responses via VMS indicating it’s OK for them to begin a new trip. For day-boat fishermen, the issue is significant if the delay involves more than an hour.
Council member Rip Cunningham of Massachusetts said, “It’s not fair to tell someone, ‘We’re going to chew up 25% of your day until you get a response from the system.’”
Several council members recognized that the March 7 permit holder letter struck some fear into fishermen.
The letter stated, “Please note that if you do not declare a valid activity code prior to leaving port, NMFS will require that you return to port and select a valid VMS declaration prior to sailing.”
The letter concluded, “Sailing without declaring an activity code prior to the start of each fishing trip is in violation of the Northeast fisheries regulations and may result in enforcement action.”
Massachusetts council member Rodney Avila said, “This is actually going to reinforce the feeling of skepticism people have about VMS.”
However, he also recognized that NMFS needed accurate information.
“We need to have a system that works for both parties,” he said. “I can see this is a big burden on the day-boat fishery and it’s an extra cost to them.”
NMFS working on it
NMFS’s Sue Murphy said the sustainable fisheries division of the Northeast Regional Office was already working with the NMFS Office for Law Enforcement to improve the situation.
“We are looking into other options to make this easier,” she said.
One idea being discussed, she said, was the creation of a “pop-up” screen so that fishermen automatically would be asked something like: “Here’s where you fished last time. Is this where you want to fish again on this trip?”
But Goethel said that wouldn’t help fishermen who climb into skiffs, row to their moorings, and haul themselves aboard ice-cold boats in the dead of winter.
“The computer doesn’t work,” he emphasized. “This is an unacceptable situation for the (hundreds) of boats that are on moorings.”
New Hampshire fisherman and council member Mike Leary added that NMFS shouldn’t rely on communicating by e-mail to correct the problem.
“You can send them all the e-mails you want, but if the computer isn’t on, they won’t get them,” he said.
Seeking fixes
The council in the end voted to “request that NMFS evaluate” the VMS declaration requirements and “determine if other processes … would be more practical.”
But even before that point, Kurkul indicated NMFS’s willingness to address the situation, especially the wintertime problem of computers not functioning well in the cold.
Rhode Island fisherman and council member Phil Ruhle was concerned that the problem cut across all fisheries that require VMS, not just groundfish, and he wanted it addressed on a broader basis.
“At the end of the day, we’ve got to get this to be friendly and usable for everyone,” he said.
Janice M. Plante
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