Vessel Operating Units (Vessels)

This data set contains data for vessels that are greater than five net tons and have a current US Coast Guard documentation number. Beginning in1979, the NMFS initiated a system to conduct an annual survey to inventory all of the vessels that actively fished in commercial fisheries during the previous calendar year. The survey is conducted by port agents that are located at fishing port throughout the Southeast Region. They record the physical information about the vessels, e.g., length, age, horsepower, etc., as well as gathering information about the fishing characteristics of the vessels, e.g., type and amount of gear, number of crew, etc. Often the physical characteristics of the vessels are retrieved from the data maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard as part of their vessel documentation program. In recent years, much of the fishing characteristics are retrieved from either trip ticket and/or logbook data

The primary purpose of this data set is to provide an annual inventory of the vessels that are documented by the US Coast Guard and actively fished during a calendar year.

Inventory of active vessels by year

Location Of The Main Office Of The South East Fisheries Science Center

Read and sign for NOAA Administrative Order 216 100 Read and sign System Access Application (see URLs)

Waiver Needed

Oracle Tables

Data are quality controlled by state personnel and port agents. Values are compared against valid lists of values.

This data is currently wavered under the current NOAA guidelines for relational databases.

The archival process is currently under development.

The data resides on a secure database server only accessible through the NMFS network requiring separate multi-factor authentication for both network and database access.