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www.sea-technology.com August 2016 / st 23 I t's an early foggy morning in November off the coast of Oregon. The FV Seeker is out searching the cold, choppy water for the perfect place to drop its trawl net. This is only going to be a test run for the captain, meant to find out what kind of fish lie in wait below his ship on the ocean's floor. The captain is noticeably concerned about staying within the strict new regulations and catching only the fish he is permitted to, particularly with a fisheries inspector standing by on board. He's been worried since the West Coast of the U.S. had adopted an individual boat quota allotment system in response to commer- cial fish stocks in decline, which stipulates that each boat has a biomass weight allotment for a given time period for each fishery based on that boat's histor- ical average yield—this is known as Individual Fish- ing Quotas (IFQ). There are reports that these new regulations are effective in rebuilding some fish stocks. But these stricter regulations are also making it harder for the smaller fleets to stay in business and for the larger fleets to stay profitable. If the captain fails to comply with these regulations, he may be fined, lose his boat or even face criminal charges. He does not want to catch fish that he is not licensed for, and he certainly does not want to catch fish that are endangered, as those fines are astronomical. Neither does he want to catch fish that are too small—why go through all the expense of fuel, crew wages and wear and tear on his boat, risking his own life and those of his crew, only to fill his quota with fish that won't bring him good market value or not fill his quota at all? For a small boat like his, the margins are razor thin. An unproductive catch will end up losing him money, and it does not take too many unproductive catches before a small boat is forced to go out of business and sell off its quota—typically to a larger fleet. That is why the captain chooses his site carefully, even surveying it with sophisticated side scan sonar, trying to divine whether there's anything worth fishing for. Sonar, a "ping-back" technology invented in the 1940s, only pro- duces a fuzzy image. It has been slowly becoming more sophisticated but still cannot reliably distinguish between fish species, or even between fish and the ocean floor. Unwilling to rely on just his intuition about what lies be- low, the captain readies the crew to drop the net for a "test tow". The new bycatch regulations have come with tighter enforcement: The boat's owner is actually pay- ing over $100/hr. for a trained agent, ready on deck with his clip- board, scale and cam- era, prepared to docu- ment any violation. Finally, by late morning, after a few hours of towing, the Seeker is ready to haul the trawl net back in. With the fisheries in- spector standing by, the crew starts spooling up the net. When the catch end of the net breaks the surface, the trawl net looks amazingly full—a great catch! But as the net begins to open up, everyone's excitement turns to horror. Dumping onto the deck is 47,000 lb. of Canary Rock Fish, a species that, at the time of this catch, was listed as overfished and, hence, illegal. That winter morning tow was a disaster of epic propor- tions for the Seeker's crew and captain. The boat not only exceeded its own quota, but it exceeded the quota of the entire fishery and caused an immediate closure for the re- mainder of that season and the next. The government shut down the fishery for the rest of 2015 and, theoretically, for 2016 as well. This affected over $5 million worth of fish that, because of the Seeker's blind error, nobody could fish for. Unfortunately, the Seeker is not the only boat that has run into this problem. Other trawlers have come up against Smart Tech Enables Catch Precision DigiCatch Helps Fishermen Precisely Harvest Target Species By Rob Terry DigiCatch on the deck of the FV Tabatha.