Oregon Sport Tuna Landings

[Chum King]

FYI.

I checked up on the estimated Oregon sport catch of albacore tuna this season. Through Sunday July 13 the landed catch totals over 1,800 fish. :shocked:

This is well above the catch for the same time period in either of the last two years. Also this week could easily surpass last weeks 1,400 tuna. Enjoy the season, it looks like a very good albacore year has shaped up for Oregon. :smile:

[Mark Mc]

Hi Eric, can you tell us where this data comes from? Is it an educated guess / extrapolation from some dock checks? I'm really curious, since (1) Oregon charter boats don't keep logs (by law, yet); (2) we don't have a tuna tag, and (3) I have never been surveyed as to how many tuna I caught, nor have I ever seen anyone ask such question at the docks.

Maybe someone at ODFW just keeps a running count from what they see on ifish!! Wouldn't that be a hoot.

Thanks....MArk

[Chum King]

The catch estimate is split into two parts the charter boat estimate and the private boat estimate:

The charter catch estimate is generated from a combination of our regular dock interviews, and reported trips and landings from the charter offices and captains (via a modified log book type of reporting system that we have been using for years). Using this method for the established charters, we account for nearly 100% of the charter effort and catch.

The private boat catch estimate is from the same method that we use to estimate all the other ocean private boat effort and catches. We make a count of the private boats going out to the ocean (the boat count methodology varies a bit between ports), and then we interview a "random" cross section of the returning trips to find out the percent of boats fishing for each major target species, the average number of anglers per boat, and the catch per boat (amongst other things). Then the interview data is applied back to the total number of boats that went fishing to generate estimates of number of anglers and the catch.

There is no question that our private boat albacore estimates are not as accurate as our other catch estimates. This is largely due to the tendency of boats that are fishing albacore to return to port late in the day. Oftentimes, after the "fish checkers" have gone off duty. However, we do check some of the private boats that fish albacore. One thing to keep in mind with our estimate of the private boat albacore catch is that it should be considered a minimal estimate.

[ 07-17-2003, 10:11 AM: Message edited by: Chum King ]

[Mark Mc]

Thanks for the explanation Eric. Sounds like the best method available at this time. Ever since the early stages of the HMS plan, I have been advocating that we have an accurate count of sport caught tuna by some more systematic method out of a concern that if quotas ever get put into place, they would be based in large part on our "historic" count. So if we are being under-counted (which my gut feeling says we are) we would get short-changed in any allocation scheme. This in contrast to the commercial take, which of course is much more accurately counted (by comparison) via landing receipts & logs.

Thanks again for all your hard work.....Mark