Fishing Vessel Monitoring Systems: Past, Present and Future

VMS: Past, Present and Future 7
It is interesting that, until now, though the technology exists and can be easily
implemented, there are very few examples of such operational systems.
Examples would include Iceland and Norway and, to a lesser extent, regional
fisheries management authorities, such as the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries
Organization (NAFO), the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the
Forum Fisheries Agency of the South Pacific. The principal difference between
the two Nordic countries and the mentioned RFMOs is that the former provide
their data using fully electronic forms, to that it is entered automatically and
immediately in the receiving authority’s database. The latter use electronic
means of transmitting their data (e.g. satellite telephone or data systems) but
without the use of electronic forms. Whilst this speeds delivery of the data to the
authority, there remains a manual step required to enter it in the database.
It should be noted that, despite the existence of the technology, there is probably
a very strong political reason that full electronic catch reporting from sea has
been slow to be implemented: that the collation of real-time electronic catch data
and VMS data is a highly sensitive point so far as the fishing industry is
concerned. Vessel operators, correctly, consider this data to be commercially
confidential. Until a means can be devised to assure them that this data will be
completely safe from their competitors, they will resist its implementation.
Resolving some of these concerns is within the brief of the European
Commission’s SHEEL (Secure and Harmonised Electronic European Logbook)
research project, scheduled for completion in 2006.
The SHEEL project estimates that the operation cost of a detailed catch report
would be somewhere between less that $1 and $5 per report, depending upon
the size of the report and the transmission medium used. Putting a catch report
into place would require investment equal to a laptop computer as user terminal
and the necessary software to manage the electronic logbook. It is far more
difficult to define this last costl
2.0 State of the art
It is impossible to discuss the use of satellite navigation and communications
systems and their role in fishing vessel monitoring without a shared
understanding of exactly what is a VMS. It is often assumed that VMS is a
synonym for satellite surveillance. This is not accurate.
At the current state of the art VMS is a “cooperative” system where only
participating vessels are monitored. It is a “cooperative” system because each
participating vessel must carry an operating transmitter or transceiver
(sometimes incorrectly referred to as a transponder, which is capable of fixing a
position, (in most cases, calculating its own position and thus the position of the
boat carrying it). An automated reporting system then controls the transmission