My Reason for Leaving Northeast Trawl Advisory Panel – Captain Sam Novello
For the last ten years, NOAA Fisheries’ top decision-makers have known that their trawl surveys were inadequate because of overspreading nets, which gave poor and inefficient stock assessments. However, they did little to fix this problem because of historical reasons.
I was asked to join the NTAP (Northeast Trawl Advisory Panel) by NEFMC and I did because I believed could help, because I am quite knowledgeable about fishing and how to get fishing gear to fish properly. In the year 2000, I was on the spring survey of the R/V Albatross, and I was told by some of the crew who were x-commercial fishermen, that when the net was hauled you would not like the results. (so true) At that time, my vessel which was a side-trawler was using 60-80 net as the Albatross was using. My thoughts were, we have a catching problem here, on the Albatross. This net lacked any bottom contact. My thoughts were what are the differences between my net and the Albatross net. Albatross main wire is 36 feet apart, and my main wires on a side trawler are together,2. Albatross does not use 10 fathoms ground wire as I did on my boat. These are the two major problems with NOAA Fisheries Trawl surveys which cause overspreading nets & lack the proper bottom contact.
The first NOAA Fisheries survey work was done by the Delaware which was aside trawler & the main wires were together, then came the Albatross main wires were 36 feet, and then came Bigelow its main wires were 50 feet apart causing more over-spreading. I believe calibration was done by Albatross and Bigelow which shows a false picture of the stock assessment the calibration should have been between the Delaware and the Albatross which would have a truer picture of the fish stock assessment. Between all of NOAA’s research vessels, Delaware’s surveys gave a truer picture of fish stocks.
How to fix this problem, add 10 fathoms of ground wire to the Bigelow’s net and any other survey with this arrangement will give you a little more ground coverage and would lessen the overspreading of the net, which would improve the catchability of the net.
Then get 2 vessels to do a test with a Bigelow net, one vessel with 10-fathom ground on–one vessel rigged as Bigelow is rigged, do tests an ample time, then calibrate the results will be a big difference between the vessels. (I believe most commercial vessels with 450 hp. could do the task).
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