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NOAA Fisheries has released the 2022-2023 sea-day schedule for commercial fishing trips selected for observer coverage. Two new information reports that support the schedule are also available. The documents are posted online.
Achieving sea days in 2021 continued to be a challenge due to high attrition rates and low observer availability, small training class sizes, and COVID-19 coverage waivers. These issues are a direct result of the pandemic. As a result, the 2020-2021 data set is relatively small in comparison to pre-pandemic years and a discard analysis was not conducted.
Instead, this year’s sea-day schedule is based on the most recent full data set (2018-2019), accounting for fleet changes that occurred in June 2020 through July 2021, and incorporating the effects of FY22 funding and sea scallop compensation rate.
This is the same approach NOAA Fisheries adopted last year to deal with similar data issues caused by the pandemic.
There are 3,382 agency-funded days for fishery monitoring, 3,099 days fewer than required. We have used the prioritization process described in the Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology Omnibus Amendment to allocate available funds to fishing fleets monitored using these sea days.
For groundfish vessels in this fishing year, we estimate that 704 Northeast Fisheries Observer Program sea days can offset the days required for at-sea monitoring, and that 100% of vessel costs for at-sea monitoring will be covered with funds specifically appropriated by Congress for this purpose.
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