A Familiar Feeling
It’s late at night, the coastal shops have been squarely shut down and locked up for the evening, and no one is around save for a couple of late night diners in the local restaurants. I am walking through the quiet downtown of Scituate, Massachusetts, before the tourist season has ramped up, until I reach the pier. I’ve been here many times before.
The breeze wafts notes of the sea, diesel, and fish remnants through the air. I climb the familiar worn metal ladder down. It’s low tide; this has always been my most dreaded part, juggling all my belongings while descending down algae slick rungs. I grab the side of the boat precariously and shimmy along the gunwale until I reach the back of the boat and firmly plant my feet on the back deck.
The F/V Mary Elizabeth has not changed in the many years since I last saw her. Years ago I sailed on this vessel as a fisheries observer. Today I’m sailing as scientific staff with the Cooperative Research Branch for their Gulf of Maine Bottom Longline Survey. While working and living on a commercial fishing vessel remains much the same, participating in survey work differs greatly from being an observer.
Station Selection
Our survey sampled 45 locations in the western and central Gulf of Maine. The majority of those stations occurred on rough bottom habitat. This complements the Bottom Trawl Survey, which typically cannot efficiently sample rough bottom areas. Data poor stocks such as cusk and Atlantic wolffish love rocky bottom habitats, making bottom longline gear ideal for catching these species. We also sample seven stations classified as smooth bottom.
The captains correctly predict that the smooth bottom areas will have lower catches. On a normal fishing trip, they would never target such areas because they would not be profitable. So why do we do it in our survey? The goal of our survey is different from that of a commercial fishing trip. Fishermen aim to catch as many legal sized fish as possible to earn a profit. Smooth bottom areas are incorporated into our survey design to account for habitat variation, to holistically estimate the population.
Higher Spirits
We charter and work with two commercial fishing vessels for our survey, the F/V Mary Elizabeth and the Tenacious II. The captains are able to sell legal sized fish we catch. In many ways this takes the pressure off of having a bad fishing day. As an observer, I experienced the full range of emotions at the end of a fishing trip. Sometimes the crew was ecstatic and the boat was piled high with fish; other times the fishing was so poor that the catch sold wasn’t enough to pay for the diesel that day and everyone was disappointed.
More Sleep
“What do you mean we don't fish through the night?” I asked the chief scientist on my first trip. I was both delighted and shocked. You mean I get to sleep through the night? Coming from observing, most of my trips were on bottom trawl gear which ranged from 1- to 8-hour tows. As soon as the net came onboard, the catch was dumped on deck, and the net was set back into the ocean again. Sleep usually consisted of 2- to 3-hour nap increments for days on end.
But on the longline survey we do things a little differently. Our gear, which is one nautical mile of hooks, is set on a slack tide to standardize the impact of the gear drifting off location during deployment, and soaked for 2 hours before retrieving. This means that we must plan our trips and station sets accordingly. There are times in which we complete three or even all four tides during the day depending on proximity of one station to the next. If we finish one station and cannot make it to the next during the tide window, we have to wait until the next tide to deploy the gear.
An Abundance of Biological Data
Every single fish gets weighed and measured. Did I mention that there are 1,000 hooks on the gear? That’s right, every one is accounted for. This is why two scientific staff members sail on our survey. One of us is weighing, measuring lengths, and taking biological samples, while the other is recording and operating our tablet-based data collection system. This allows us to process higher volumes of fish without sacrificing data quality. We take otoliths and maturity data from many of the fish which gives stock assessment scientists the age and reproductive status of the individual.
As an observer in the Northeast, I deployed on commercial fishing vessels by myself and it was solely up to me to collect catch data for each haul. Based on the gear type and other various factors, I had an arsenal of catch estimation strategies I could use to account for all of the catch. We only measured and sampled a small portion of the catch based on priority for that area.
More Technology, Less Paperwork!
On the Bottom Longline Survey, we use a lot of Bluetooth connected devices to quickly collect the data and reduce transcription errors. All of our baskets have barcodes. We start by selecting the fish species in the tablet, then we scan the basket, and hit print on our scale. Boom, the record is automatically sent into the tablet. Next, we use an electronic measuring board and a magnet to collect lengths of the fish, which also goes directly into the tablet. And finally, if we take otoliths, we place them in barcoded envelopes which—you guessed it—also get scanned directly into the tablet. The only sheets of paper we use to collect data is a data sheet where we record calibrations for our devices, and one that references the frequency we need to take otoliths from various species.
As an observer, I collected the bulk of my data in a waterproof notebook which was then transcribed onto paper logs and finally input into a tablet. Some of my trips would have more than 100 pages of paperwork! I could spend many hours during and after a trip recording data onto logs and into the tablet which could inevitably introduce mistakes.
There are many nuanced differences between working as a fisheries observer and as part of a survey team. But, there is one thing that remains the same no matter the title: the feeling of conducting field work at sea. The highs are high, from captivating sunsets to seeing the ocean’s bounty up close. And the lows are low; poor weather makes everything harder including the work that must get done and even eating and sleeping. But being offshore, many miles from land, surrounded by the big blue is a feeling so freeing and yet so grounding that I didn’t know it was possible until I had experienced it myself.
