Assessing the capability and willingness of skippers towards fishing industry-led data collection

We explore the capability, willingness and practicalities of data collection by skippers, and the feasibility of using these data to document fishing patterns and catch composition in the English inshore sector. Thirty skippers of under 10 m vessels in south coast England collected detailed information on the gear they used, species, size, proportion of catch retained and discarded as well as the reasons for discarding during daily fishing trips. Fisheries observers accompanied participating vessels on prearranged trips to independently record the catch levels and collect length data. The data from skippers showed significant differences between gear types on the level of daily catch with the daily catch for gill net, otter trawl and tangle net significantly higher than that of drift net, hand line and ring net. Discard rates varied between the different gear types with trammel net (27%) and tangle net (22%) showing the highest discards ratios, while hand lines (4%) the lowest. Comparison of the number of species recorded by skipper and observer on the same fishing trips shows that the number recorded by observer was two times that of the skipper indicating that skippers are poor at identifying species in the discarded catch as they do not pay a lot of attention to this portion of the catch. Catch data from corresponding trips also show low correlations between the self-collected data from skippers and data from observers. Accurate discard rates are important as they are applied to landings data to estimate total catch and therefore total fishing mortality. Results show that the skippers consistently underestimated the discard rates when compared to the observer data implying that weighting factors will be needed if the data from skippers are to be used in stock assessments.