RHODE ISLAND CHARTER AND PARTY BOAT CAPTAINS TO PARTICIPATE IN NEW COAST-WIDE RECREATIONAL MARINE FISHING DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM

PROVIDENCE - The Department of Environmental Management has announced that beginning this week Rhode Island's 80-plus charter and party boat captains will be asked to participate in a new data collection survey system to elicit improved catch and effort statistics for recreational marine fisheries.

The program, called the For-Hire Survey, is being implemented on a coast-wide basis by the National Marine Fisheries Service in collaboration with the state partners of the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program, of which Rhode Island is a member.

In Rhode Island, a weekly random sampling of charter fishing boat captains will be asked to report their fishing effort from the previous week, such as number of trips, number of anglers, targeted species, area fished and number of fish caught. In addition, an observer will collect catch and discard data on selected large party boat trips.

Recreational marine fisheries catch and effort data has been collected from Rhode Islanders since 1981 through telephone surveys to households in coastal counties and by interviews with anglers in popular fishing areas. While those methods provide estimated recreational marine fishing statistics, and will be continued, they do not provide accurate data for charter and party boat catch and effort. The new program is designed to provide more accurate statistics from that sector of the recreational marine fishery to help better manage fish stocks of importance to the sector. Its methodology has been thoroughly tested and reviewed, and has been used in Maine since 1995, and in pilot studies in North Carolina, South Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico.

DEM marine fisheries staff and a program manager from the National Marine Fisheries Service met with Rhode Island charter and party boat captains in April to explain the program. Members of the Rhode Island Charter and Party Boat Association expressed support for improving recreational data collection programs and provided vital input on the survey.

The estimated impact of recreational anglers can be seen in the most recent statistics provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Last year in Rhode Island, nearly 300,000 recreational marine anglers - more than half from out-of-state - made over 1.2 million trips, catching 6.2 million fish and releasing more than half of them. Nationally, in 1997, 17 million recreational marine anglers made 68 million fishing trips, catching 366 million fish, and releasing half of them.