Fishing catch data flawed

Commercial fishermen all across the region — like Bill Doughty and Bill Amaru — are discovering serious errors in government issued catch histories for the 10-year period chosen to determine how much they can catch and earn in 2010 — the first year of "catch share" sector fishing.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has acknowledged problems with their calculations, but says it will not attempt to make corrections in time to affect the relative catch share grants to fishermen for the 2010 fishing season.

"I'm driving into Bangor, which is 140 miles from here (Harpswell, Maine) to buy myself an adding machine with paper," Bill Doughty said yesterday after checking the official report against his landings data, and confirming that he was not credited with about 40 percent of his catch one year and 25 percent of it in another.

He had not checked the other eight years. Together, Doughty figures he will be denied about $135,000 of catchable weight from those years alone.

"We found over 100,000 pounds of efforts and omissions," Amaru, one of Cape Cod's last trawlers, wrote in an e-mail. "We are a small operation, just my son and I.

"If my losses are this bad, what do you think the rest of the fleet lost?" said Amaru, a former member of the New England Fishery Management Council, the region's grassroots legislative and policy writing body.

Shortages in official catch histories are showing up in reconciliations of about 10 percent of the commercial federal permit holders, according to Vito Giacalone, the region's statistical and sector guru.

Thirteen of the 16 sectors or fishing cooperatives organized to operate under the new catch share business model are fused to the platform of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, which is based in Gloucester. Giacalone is a founder of the coalition and an influential analyst.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which calculated and distributed and 10 year catch histories (1996-2006) to fishermen — to help them evaluate options for determining individual catch shares — recognizes the somewhat common existence of errors in their data.

"We are continuing to audit our data and encouraging vessel owners to let us know if they see any potential errors," said NMFS spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus. "We will investigate any errors and, where appropriate, make corrections."

However, Mooney-Seus said the complexity of making corrections bars rectifying catch histories for 2010, which is the inaugural year of the sector/catch share program. Beginning next year, the sectors will operate under a catch share system.

The sectors could involve a sizeable majority of the boats with federal groundfishing permits or less if many permitholders who reserved sector membership decide to drop out and fish in the common pool.

The sectors will operate on aggregate catch shares, the sum of the individual catch shares granted by NMFS and based on the relative size of the various 10-year catch histories — however inaccurate they might be. Fishermen who have opted not to join sectors, and instead fish independently in a "common pool," will work under modified effort controls, such as days at sea.

Tuesday midnight was the deadline for filing sector business plans and membership rosters. Permitholders who signed up with a sector reserved the option to drop out and into the common pool, but those without a sector contract cannot belatedly opt in.

Under a system voted by the New England Fishery Management Council, a 10-year catch history (1996-2006) is being used to assemble a catch share system, the top policy initiative of the Obama administration for the nation's commercial fisheries.

The innovation was crafted by environmental academics and is favored by the two biggest ENGOs or environmental non-government organizations — the Environmental Defense Fund and Pew Environment Group. An alumna of both groups, Jane Lubchenco, the federal government's new chief administrator in charge of fisheries, has put catch shares on the top of her agenda.

Richard Fuka, president of the Rhode Island Fisherman's Alliance, said he has heard from fishermen from Long Island, New Jersey and Rhode Island about catch histories that undercount for the years selected as the comparative in setting the region's, the sectors' and the individuals' catch shares.

"A fisherman's log book can be used in a court of law," said Fuka. "This is an alarming problem. These guys are physically crying — it's almost Katrina-like, unrealistic stuff."

Imprecise data collection and processing has also been cited repeatedly by fishing interests and lawyers as a root cause of misguided prosecutions of fishermen by the law enforcement arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Attorney Stephen Ouellette, whose Gloucester-based fishing and admiralty practice ranges along the entire Atlantic coast, has made poor record-keeping a theme of his complaints.

In 2008 he wrote to Congressman John Tierney about a client, Manchester boat owner Richard Burgess, who found himself facing heavy fines arising from faulty information out of the same "information systems management section" that has been producing the 10-year catch histories now being vetted by the recipient-fishermen.

"Their computerized system ... is often down when fishermen call," he wrote, providing numerous case studies. NMFS' inability to provide real time advice on available days at sea is also notorious — a failing that puts boats at risk of prosecution for excessive effort, or sitting at home and leaving authorized time unused.

Maine fisherman Doughty said yesterday that, in the first two years within the defining 10-year continuum that he checked against his own records, he found NMFS had no record of a 153,000-pound fishing trip in 2004. He said that, overall, NMFS gave him credit for 247,030 pounds of mixed groundfish, short 255,000 pounds from the dealer records that he had kept.

For 2002, he had records of selling 107,000 pounds more than the 396,860 credited to his account by NMFS.

"Those two years stick out in your memory," Doughty said. "You remember the good years."

Giacalone said he'd heard from about 10 percent of the fishermen regarding errors they believe they caught in the NMFS catch histories.

"But suspecting a mistake is not the same as finding one," he said.

He quickly added that he had no doubt that NMFS' data was faulty.

"There are definitely people who are short 100 landing events," he said. He also credited the late Phil Ruhle, a crusader against NMFS science, with predicting the emerging data problem for the catch share and sector program.

"Phil Ruhle, God rest his soul, had no faith in the data," Giacalone said. "He said if you base the allocation on catch data alone, it will not work."

Ruhle— who, early in the decade helped uncover the "Trawlgate" fiasco, when NMFS was getting distorted trawl data for use in setting catch limits due to misuse of technology, died last summer when his boat sank off the New Jersey coast.

Mooney-Seus explained that making changes in catch histories for individuals will ripple through the industry.

"This is because, when you change one individual's share," she wrote in an e-mail, "this effects everyone else's share in the entire groundfishery — including those in the common pool."

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com

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