Contact: Scott Smullen FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
8/21/97The federal agency responsible for saltwater fisheries will spend nearly a half million dollars over the next year to improve collection of data about recreational charter boat fishing trips in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced today. The agency developed, and will implement in September, the Charter Boat Research Program to test new methods of data collection to gain enhanced information about this recreational fishing sector.
The Charter Boat Research Program is a new pilot survey that will test methods to collect fishing effort data directly from charter boat owners and crew, rather than from telephone interviews of coastal residents. The pilot studies will determine if this information will be easier to collect and less variable than information collected from anglers through random-digit-dialing.
Two new methods will be tested -- a telephone survey of charter boat operators and a logbook panel survey of charter boat operators -- in parallel with the current Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey (MRFSS) method. The surveys will be conducted from Sept. 1, 1997, through Aug. 31, 1998.
Evaluation of the two pilot methods and the MRFSS survey will be conducted by comparing data collection approaches, accuracy and variability of charter boat fishing effort estimates, survey costs, cooperation rates of captains and anglers, and reporting burden on the charter industry.
Under the existing national survey, random-digit-dialing of coastal households to gather marine recreational fishing effort data will continue to be coupled with charter boat intercept surveys of completed recreational fishing trips for fish catch and other biological information. The combined approach yields valuable information about the recreational fishery over broad geographic ranges.
The project is a cooperative study by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources.
The fisheries service amended a cooperative agreement with the Gulf commission to add over $350,000 to coordinate and conduct the telephone survey of coastal charter boat operators and to conduct the routine MRFSS charter boat intercept interviews in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. The cooperating agencies developed comprehensive directories of charter boats and their operators for this purpose. Additional funding will support the pilot logbook panel survey in the Florida Panhandle area.
Cooperation by the charter boat industry is critical to the success of this project, and boat captains have been involved in the planning process. The fisheries service held public outreach meetings with charter boat associations in Louisiana in May, in Mississippi and Alabama in June, and in the Florida Keys in mid-July. Additional Florida meetings were held in Destin on Aug. 11, Panama City on Aug. 12, Ft. Myers on Aug. 13, St. Petersburg on Aug. 14, and Crystal River on Aug. 15. For more information about these meetings call David Van Voorhees at (301) 713-2328.