On 6 Dec 2005 01:22:21 -0800, wrote:
http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/refm/observers/default.htm
http://www.apo-observers.org/Observe...o_homepage.htm

Thanks for the links - I will definitely look into them.

How about this. Put some black box gizmo (design left to the electronic
wizards here) that sends vessel position back to home base or easier
yet, simply records vessel movements for play back later. Hey, do they
make a cheep GPS that records course traveled? Stick it in a sealed box
with external antenna. If crew tampering is evident bust the boat for a
few Boks. No problem there except if your fishing boat is meeting a MS
for clandestine offloads.

That is basically what is happening - the idea is that the boats will only be
given the diesel subsidy (which is quite significant) in return for being
tracked. The tracking will actually be done in real time.

The idea is to incorporate (if possible) a catch monitoring function into the
tracking equipment, so not only do you know where they are, but whether their
nets are in or out, and whether their nets are full or empty.

So it sounds as though you simply want to make sure the boats bring
their catch home.

Yes, all of it. :-)
If the government is going to subsidize the fishermen's fuel, it want to make
sure the fish come back to be sold locally.

Problem one: how does the USA monitor vessel movement/location? USCG
uses planes and cutters. I think the 378' Morgenthau was patrolling the
East Pacific for a while. Does your host nation have a navy? Do not
forget onboard observers. There are electronic methods that cost less
than a C130 or a P3.

There is talk of aircraft, though there are bigger problems around here like
pirates & smugglers, so tracking fishermen is a pretty low priority for these
valuable aircraft resources.

How much do you have to spend for the program? What resources are
available to deploy?

That's a good question - at the moment it's the other way around. They want
us to come up with a proposal & a price, and they'll say yes or no.

We are looking at providing the tracking, and we are very experienced in this
side of things, but the catch monitoring is another kettle of fish, if you'll
pardon the pun.

you'll see an ad for some trawl technology that's pretty cool. Its
called ""trawl sonar." Been around since the mid 1980s It shows
what's going in the net and will "pop and egg" when certain
points in the codend (bag) are full.

"pop and egg"? No Google hits. I've just ordered my subscription to National
Fisherman though. Trawl sonar brought up some hits though - some fancy gear
at http://www.wesmar.com/trawl.html

There are also non technical ways to insure compliance but would need
someone knowledgably with local cultural beliefs-values-attitudes and
morays. Maybe a cultural anthologist or ex Peace Corp Volunteer could
help. There may be a simple "cultural" answerer. So why do the
fishers feel compelled to sell their catch else where? Okay the
obvious........ better price or maybe?

Pretty sure it's price - no fuel subsidy in neighbouring countries, so fish
price is expensive. Subsidy here, but no compulsion to bring back. Well, the
law is there (I think), but insufficient enforcement.

Unfortunately I'm just an engineer working for a company providing tracking
equipment. The legalities & moral consequences of how it is used is decided
higher up than me. :-)

The fish counting is not a problem. Just have the boats brail, dump,
suck, pike the buggers onto a scale on the dock.

That's the current problem - they fill up with fuel, disappear for a week,
come back empty, asking for more fuel. The unknown is whether they are
sailing around the corner & selling their fuel to foreign vessels, or
catching fish & selling them to neighbouring countries, or both. Real-time
tracking will answer most of these questions, but catch monitoring will also
help.

The real issue is
compliance to local law. Or in other words, how do you secure a border
and monitor vessel movement?

Not so easy in developing countries with scarce enforcement resources.

So my third question now is......How much do you have to spend?

Me? None! :-)

The client - not sure. They want us to include an option for detecting catch
amounts with our tracking system. If it's within their (unknown) budget, then
they will hopefully take the option. Presumably if they are at all interested
we will have to do some trials first.

Dave

On 2005-12-09, Dave Baker wrote:

The real issue is
compliance to local law. Or in other words, how do you secure a border
and monitor vessel movement?

Not so easy in developing countries with scarce enforcement resources.

So my third question now is......How much do you have to spend?

Me? None! :-)

The client - not sure. They want us to include an option for detecting catch
amounts with our tracking system. If it's within their (unknown) budget, then
they will hopefully take the option. Presumably if they are at all interested
we will have to do some trials first.

You may be able to measure how much the have in their hold by measuring the
displacement - IE depth - IE water pressure at a underwater point on the hull.

if you can measure torque or RPM on the propshaft or turbulence near the
propellor that measure combined with speed (calculated from GPS readings)
would give some indication wether they were towing anything.

another point to meter would be the operation of the winch motor or mechanism.








Dave


--

Bye.
Jasen

Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2005-12-09, Dave Baker wrote:


The real issue is
compliance to local law. Or in other words, how do you secure a border
and monitor vessel movement?

Not so easy in developing countries with scarce enforcement resources.


So my third question now is......How much do you have to spend?

Me? None! :-)

The client - not sure. They want us to include an option for detecting catch
amounts with our tracking system. If it's within their (unknown) budget, then
they will hopefully take the option. Presumably if they are at all interested
we will have to do some trials first.


You may be able to measure how much the have in their hold by measuring the
displacement - IE depth - IE water pressure at a underwater point on the hull.


You might need to compensate for fuel load and, for the suspicious,
ballast tankage. A long term average might actually compensate for
heave, etc.


if you can measure torque or RPM on the propshaft or turbulence near the
propellor that measure combined with speed (calculated from GPS readings)
would give some indication wether they were towing anything.

And displacement vs drag vs speed vs fuel flow vs windage might help
refine the reading. But still, you got bycatch to worry about, eh,
and disposable anchor blocks, what else?

Sounds pretty invasive to me. Pretty vulnerable to cheating, too.

Terry K


another point to meter would be the operation of the winch motor or mechanism.








Dave

On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:28:23 +0800, Dave Baker
wrote:

The idea is to incorporate (if possible) a catch monitoring function into the
tracking equipment, so not only do you know where they are, but whether their
nets are in or out, and whether their nets are full or empty.

================================================== ========

You might be able to do something fairly simple if you have decent
upload bandwidth. Consider an internet enabled camera with imbedded
software and IP functionality (readily available for reasonable $$$s).

It could be pointed at the back deck and do a periodic upload of a
picture along with the data stream. Most fishing boats in this
countrykeep the back deck brightly lit even in the middle of the
night.

And if the lights do go out, you know there is something fishy going
on. :-)

Consider adding the camera even if the bandwidth is not really there,
visual deterrent as they say.

Hi:
I am more I incline to go with the camera with an integrated gps
watching the back deck idea. Excellent deterrent!!
You get photo, time, and Lat-Long. If bandwidth is a problem make sure
the camera has a hard disk for storage. Do not use live feed. Down load
it when the boat returns to port. If the camera unit is "lost at
sea" seize the boat and disappear the skipper's first born.

But how do you estimate catch size? When I worked F/T I painted marks
on poles (maybe sorting boards on your boats) and the trawl deck at
every so many parts of a meter at various spots. Sort of reminded me of
how a football field is marked. That way I could get a very rough
estimate of the size of the codend/bag. It aint real accurate, but at
least ya got a reference. Then you can use some sort of a
volume/density calculation (volume of a cylinder) to approximate the
weight. Like I said before if it floats the density is 1.0 in your
volume/density calculation. If you get real fancy instead of a cylinder
you could use the volume of a "semi ellipsoidal solid" if that was
more the shape of your codend. Damn, starting to sound a bit nurdy.

May sound like BS but it is a method approved by NMFS and in
conjunction using other methods would work for your needs. Ya know,
comparing photo estimate to the actual weight of catch delivered. I was
usually about 10 MT off on a 80-100 MT bag. So were talking about
80%-90% accuracy.

Another way is if your fishers are using reasonably "modern" nets
the codend should have a series of parallel "bands" that act much
like ribs on a wood boat to help maintain the shape of the codend. The
area between each band will have a volume when full. The midwater
Pollock guys in the Bering could usually call their tonnage about as
close as I could simply by counting the full bands in their bags. In
your case maybe three bands = 6 MT? Just guessing. I am assuming that
your 12 M boats are landing not much more that 2-10 MT per tow???

How to keep the fishers from selling fuel? Put a government seal on
their gas cap. The trucking industry uses seals on the door of the
trailer. Or a simple lock. If your boats return lockless tell them to
shove off and buy subsidized fuel someplace else. Hey........ you could
put one of those tags on the lock like a mattress has, ya know "under
the penalty of law...."

I got a bad feeling about the tow rope tension/drag sensor idea. Too
many variables and no visual evidence that a camera produces. There are
tricks a skipper can do to fool a drag sensor. Same for the RPM/torque
idea. Although most the old salts dragging on the west coast would use
a drop in rpm to indicate a full codend. But back then though, a
typical dragger was wood, 31 GRT, measured 48x13.5x7, and was powered
by a 6-71. Big difference compared to a 180' ex OSV packing twin EMDs
and towing a net with its doors spread a ¼ mile apart. And people
wonder why there are no cod left?

There you go. Problem solved.

Last though, since the host nation's RFP wants you to show yours first
try this. Give them three different bids:
1) Big $$ space age satellite tracking stuff.
2) Middle $$ Camera with gps and mass storage device that lasts for
duration of trip.
3) Little $$ On board observers funded by landing tax.

Good luck.
Bob

On 11 Dec 2005 02:12:11 -0800, wrote:

Hi:
I am more I incline to go with the camera with an integrated gps
watching the back deck idea. Excellent deterrent!!

Unfortunately our bandwidth is EXTREMELY limited - 8 bytes per hour (or
transmission) in fact! :-)

However, having an onboard camera doing local logging & offloading the data
back in port sounds like a possibility. I notice that there are digital
cameras coming out now with built-in WiFi - it would be great if one of those
could be set up to take a picture every X minutes into a big memory card,
then automatically dump the pictures into a WiFi system as soon as the
fishing boat came back to port!

How to keep the fishers from selling fuel? Put a government seal on
their gas cap. The trucking industry uses seals on the door of the
trailer. Or a simple lock. If your boats return lockless tell them to
shove off and buy subsidized fuel someplace else.

Unfortunately these boats are pretty rough & ready - something like this:
http://www.drewish.com/photos/2002/t...i/DSC01055.jpg
although this is actually a squid boat I think, with all the light globes.
Their fuel tanks might be a 44 gallon drum & their lines to their engines
might be plastic garden hoses in the worst of cases. Seals tend to be a very
small nuisance that is easily bypassed somewhere along the fuel line.

1) Big $$ space age satellite tracking stuff.
2) Middle $$ Camera with gps and mass storage device that lasts for
duration of trip.

I'll definitely give them (2) as an option.

3) Little $$ On board observers funded by landing tax.

Probably hard to find observers that would want to go out on these sort of
boats! :-) And they couldn't do it on every voyage for every boat anyway, so
the fishermen would just change tactics if the observer were to come onboard
for a voyage. We are after an electronic method that can find patterns of
abuse of the system to allow fuller investigation by humans later.

Thanks for all the good ideas from the participants in the thread though -
it's been most educational.

Dave