Northern FA: Trawling

Moderator of this page: Anne Trehu

Cascadia_OBS_and_trawling

trawl_report_2010

Attached are two documents on Cascadia trawling from Andrew Barclay. The first (Cascadia_OBS_and_trawling.pdf) is Andrew’s detailed summary of the issues and possible solutions based on his discussions last October with Scott McMullen of the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Commission (OFCC) and Walt Waldorf (OSU). The second (trawl_report_2010.pdf) is a formal NOAA fisheries summary of 2010 trawling in the area.

I plan to contact Scott McMullen to establish a dialogue on the experiment and hopefully find out where known trawling hangs are in the area of interest for Cruise 1 (mostly the FA). Leaders of Cruise 2 & 3 should probably do likewise for their sites, or perhaps we should discuss a more coordinated approach? If so, Anne is the logical person to do the contacting (but I believe she’s out of the country for another week or two).

Also got the following notes from Andrew on these files:

“Also, for a very rough idea of trawling off Gray’s Harbor, Figure 1a of the second document indicates heaviest fishing along the 100 m contour. The boxes are 10km, and assuming tows are along-slope, then 10 km both sides of the 100 m contour have 29-265 tows, or one every 30-300 m. Assuming the trawl nets are 30 m across, then there is a 10-100% chance that the entire seafloor in the 20-km swath is trawled once per year. Better data (locations where nets are set and recovered) are available from the Pacfin database; I asked for access last fall but never got a reply and didn’t follow up.”

Contents

Discussion

Comments from site migration

Jeff McGuire2011/04/26 10:02

Does anyone know how to interpret the trawling boudary kmz files? ie Trawl_RCA_Period_6_2010.kmz. I was hoping to make a map with the trawling boundaries and our nominal deployment plan.

In google earth it basically just comes up as two depth contrours (75 and 200 fathoms).

I guess I was expecting small regions that were offlimits to trawling. Is it instead specified by particular depth contours (eg no trawling between 75 and 200 fathoms or something like that)?

Maya Tolstoy2011/03/21 20:28

Great links from Chris Romsos (working with Chris Goldfinger) to sites which contain a lot of the fishing info:

The various closure areas can be downloaded from the site below. I’d send you the ones I have but it’s probably best to get them directly from the source as they may have changed in the time since I did my download.

For KML files: http://www.pcouncil.org/habitat-and-communities/area-closures/

and for information about specific closureshttp://www.nwr.noaa.gov/Groundfish-Halibut/Groundfish-Fishery-Management/Groundfish-Closed-Areas/Index.cfm

I just checked and it looks like the kml files are indeed 2010 updates (newer than what I have). Also, there is a link toward the bottom of the page for additional info (Dr. Kit Dahl).

-Chris Romsos

Maya Tolstoy2011/03/21 10:36

Documents regarding trawling posted.

Should we do this planning one cruise at a time, or should we have an overall 2011 strategy?