Tablets improve fluke data

PINPOINT ACCURACY: Charter-boat captain Steven Anderson uses his Windows tablet to record information of his catches, including GPS location. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
PINPOINT ACCURACY: Charter-boat captain Steven Anderson uses his Windows tablet to record information of his catches, including GPS location. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

When charter-boat captain Steven Anderson takes a group of fishermen out from the Port of Galilee in Narragansett on his 31-foot boat Bare Bones, he takes a touch-screen tablet so he can record data about fluke, also called summer flounder.
“I enter the details about the fluke as we’re catching them. It even gives the GPS coordinates of where the fish was caught,” said Anderson, who’s been a charter-boat captain for 10 years and owns Steve’s Boat Repair in Warwick.
“We had to do all this on paper before, and it didn’t include the latitude and longitude,” he said. “With the tablet, the captains can send all the details right away if they have Wi-Fi, or they can email it as soon as they get off the boat. Then it’s done.
“I have to submit my paper log every week. I put it in a big envelope and take it to the post office,” he said of the pre-tablet process. “It has been lost in the mail.”
Anderson is one of 10 charter-boat captains in a cooperative called Rhode Island Fish for the Future, a group conducting a pilot program to record fluke data intended to help improve the economic viability of the charter-boat industry.
The captains launched the program with an $86,200 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, awarded to the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association, a group in which all 10 captains have membership.
The two-year grant for 2013 and 2014 covers the cost of the tablets and the software to electronically record, track and report their catch.
The grant also covers the purchase of an allotment of fluke through the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Research Set Aside program, which the captains divide up among themselves for the season.
In return for collection of data, the pilot program gives the fishermen flexibility. They don’t have to wait until the state determines the opening day of fluke season, so they can book charters in advance at opportune times, like during winter boat shows. “A few years back we had a very strict season on fluke, and it really hurt the fluke industry,” said Anderson. “They wouldn’t let us catch them until July. We missed May and June.”
They are also able to keep smaller fish.
The state set this year’s minimum legal size for fluke at 18 inches, but under the research agreement, the fluke-cooperative captains are allowed to keep smaller fish of 16-to-18 inches.
“Otherwise you have to throw back a 17-and-a-half-inch fluke,” said Anderson.
“It’s very common. We took a trip [recently], and the guy caught a couple of striped bass and then he wanted to do some bottom fishing,” Anderson said. “We caught one sea bass and two fluke, and one was under the legal limit, but because of our program, we could keep it. It was enough to save the day.”
Anderson and the fluke-cooperative members are only required to record fluke data under their research agreement. But Anderson said he’s begun recording electronic data for all the fish he catches.
“I think 80 or 90 percent of fishermen would do this,” said Anderson.
Ocean State fluke fishermen were the catalyst for a team of software developers to launch a company, HarborLight Software, which specializes in fisheries data collection and is part of the pilot program.
“A few years ago my partner in the company was on a fishing trip in Rhode Island and saw the captain writing down all the information on paper,” said Bill Spain, president of HarborLight Software, based in Bethlehem, Pa.
“That captain was looking for a better way collect data. We took the idea and developed this software and entered a business-plan competition in the Lehigh Valley and we won,” said Spain. The startup got office space and other support, including from the Atlantic Coast Cooperative Statistical Program to develop the software. HarborLight Software’s Fishnet software is being utilized as an accountability tool in what is thought to be the East Coast’s first recreational-catch-share pilot program, HarborLight Software says of the Rhode Island program.
HarborLight Software forwards the data from the Rhode Island pilot project to the state and the Northeast Regional Oceans Council.
The results, so far, are positive for the Rhode Island fluke fishermen, said Kevin Gould, spokesman for the cooperative.
“Under the pilot program, charter-boat customers were able to land and keep significantly more fish without any negative biological impact to the species, based on the sizes of the fish caught and released,” said Gould.
HarborLight is serving as sector manager for collection and distribution of the catch data, said charter-boat captain Dave Monti, one of the 10 members of Rhode Island Fish for the Future, whose boat Virginia Joan, is based in North Kingstown
While reporting is not required for recreational charter captains who work only in state waters, all captains in the cooperative work in federal waters and have to provide trip reports to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monti.
Positive results from the research project using electronic data collection could certainly encourage NOAA to do away with the cumbersome paper reporting, he said.
“The system is archaic and NOAA knows it,” said Monti. “We’re certainly doing our best to help streamline this process.”

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