NOAA has opened up electronic vessel trip reporting to all Northeast region fisheries, potentially offering a more efficient means for fishermen to submit trip information on catch, gear, discards, areas fished and a host of other details required by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The new guidelines, announced last week, also could bring more of the region’s groundfishermen into the electronic trip-reporting fold than have participated since that commercial fleet was the lone segment approved to use the technology more than two years ago.

“In the past year, about 70 (groundfish) boats have been set up to report electronically, meaning the software resides on computers onboard their vessels,” said Barry Clifford, NOAA fishery information specialist. “That accounts for about 3,000 reports that we received for this past fishing year. We’re hoping that it will be more widely adopted in the coming fishing year.”

Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Northeast Seafood Coalition, said many of the groundfishermen have shied away from using the NOAA system to electronically file their trip reports because the system and its accompanying technology seemed to be ever-shifting, and because it limited their electronic reporting to just groundfish.

“They kept moving the bar and changing things when what they needed to do was simplify things,” Giacalone, the coalition’s policy director, said of NOAA officials.

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