January 25, 2017 — It’s an early foggy morning in November off the coast of Oregon. The F/V Seeker is out searching the cold, choppy water for the perfect place to drop its trawl net. This is only going to be a test run for the captain, meant to find out what kind of fish lie in wait below his ship on the ocean’s floor. The captain is noticeably concerned about staying within the strict new regulations and catching only the fish he is permitted to, particularly with a fisheries inspector standing by on board. He’s been worried since the US West Coast adopted an individual boat quota allotment system, which stipulates that each boat has a biomass weight allotment for a given time period for each fishery based on that boat’s historical average yield – the Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ). There are reports that these new regulations are effective in rebuilding some fish stocks, but the stricter regulations are also making it harder for the smaller fleets to stay in business and for the larger fleets to stay profitable. If the captain fails to comply with these regulations, he may be fined, lose his boat or even face criminal charges.
For a small boat like his, the margins are razor thin. An unproductive catch will end up losing him money. Ongoing challenges from the various NOAA “manned observer programs” continue to take their toll on profits and the need for more cost effective measures.
The captain chooses his site carefully, even surveying it with sophisticated side scan sonar, trying to divine whether there’s anything worth fishing for. Sonar, a “ping-back” technology invented in the 1940s, only produces a fuzzy image. It has been slowly becoming more sophisticated but still cannot reliably distinguish between fish species, or even between fish and the ocean floor. Unwilling to rely on just his intuition about what lies below, the captain readies the crew to drop the net for a “test tow”.