Fraser River Sockeye Fisheries and Fisheries Management - Cohen ...

The new in-season reporting system required the vessel master to:1. File a Start-Fishing report prior to beginning fishing on a fishing trip;2. File an End-Fishing Report no later than 24 hours following the end of a fishingtrip and prior to commencing a subsequent fishing trip; and3. Provide a daily catch report for each day fished before 08:00 of the following day.These additional requirements were intended to address previously documented delays incatch reporting, the lack of catch validation at landing sites, and inconsistencies betweenlogbooks, phone-in reports and sale slips (Bijsterveld et al. 2002).Area G troll includes all harvesting by troll vessels in Areas 121-127 on West CoastVancouver Island (WCVI) and Area H troll includes troll fisheries in Areas 11-18 and 29.The methods used to estimate catch for these fisheries is similar to that for the Area Dgillnet fishery. A big difference between these two fisheries is that troll fisheries oftenopen for many more days than gillnet fisheries but the aerial vessel counts used toestimate fishing effort are usually limited to the days with net fishery openings.Therefore, effort estimates for days without vessel counts must rely upon phone-in dataand estimates from the portion of vessels that provide phone-in data on a daily basis.Fortunately, the daily phone-in reporting rate for troll fishers is substantially better(>80% in recent years) than that for gillnet fishers (often 80%) with the phone-in reporting requirement. The precision of the catchestimates are unknown and reliability was rated “Medium” because the current catchmonitoring methods probably account for the vast majority of the sockeye harvested inthese fisheries.Canadian Allocations by SectorInformation on Fraser sockeye allocations by commercial gear type was not availableprior to 2000. For 2001-2006, where the catch of Fraser sockeye was greater than100,000 pieces per year, the total catch by each gear type has been fairly close to targetallocations (Table 15). Fraser sockeye catches during the period 2007-2009 were too lowfor any meaningful comparison of allocations with actual harvest shares.46