Fishing vessel safety

(from the November, 2006 issue of National Fisherman)

Back-to-back sinkings and the tragic loss of six New England fishermen in one week has once again focused the public’s attention on fishing vessel safety and the issue of licensing commercial fishermen as vessel operators.

All of the arguments and counter-arguments are once again being dusted off and trotted out. Management-imposed fishing regulations were responsible. Commercial fishing vessel operations have become too complicated to allow unlicensed people to be in charge. Reduced income has forced owners to scrimp on routine maintenance. In the last week I’ve read exhortations for more training, more education, more inspection, more regulation, more responsibility, more of just about anything dealing with vessel safety. Most of us have heard it all before, but does that mean we should disregard it?

The fact is that commercial fishing always has been and always will be one of the most dangerous occupations. Nobody who has watched Deadliest Catch, the highly rated TV series on the Alaskan crab fisheries, is likely to dispute that. But how dangerous is it, and most importantly, has it become more or less safe in recent years?

While it’s going to be difficult to do so in the wake of the of recent tragedies, we’ve got to look at these two questions objectively if we’re contemplating initiating or supporting any changes in how fishing vessels are operated or in how management measures can be modified to enhance safety at sea.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of confounding factors involved. Some of them would intuitively argue for increasingly safe fishing vessels, some for increasingly risky fishing, but major changes in how we operate our vessels or how we manage our fisheries are far too important to rely on intuition.

In many fisheries the average vessel age is increasing from year to year. Is there a significant relationship between vessel age and incidence of accidents? How about the age and/or experience of the captains and crew? Every year there seem to be fewer youngsters coming into the fisheries – at least those fisheries I’m familiar with. Does this impact on vessel safety?

Then there’s operator licensing. Many countries require that their commercial fishermen be licensed. Are vessels with licensed captains safer than similar (in terms of age, size, gear used, waters fished and technology employed) vessels operated by unlicensed captains?

Safety equipment? EPIRBs (Emergency Position Indicating Rescue Beacons) are getting smaller, cheaper, more sophisticated and more useable every year. Ditto for satellite phones. Cell phones are ubiquitous today, and most of our inshore waters are within range of the major cell networks. GPS units are readily available, with basic hand-held models costing under $100; so providing precise information on a vessel’s location is easier and more accurate than ever. Vessel Tracking System transmitters are becoming mandatory in more fisheries every year, and can be fitted with “panic buttons” which instantly alert whoever is monitoring the system in case of an emergency.

What about how the fishery is managed? We believe that derby-style fishing, where the vessels must catch their “share” as quickly as possible, is inherently less safe than when each permitted vessel is guaranteed a certain poundage each year. But back in 1999 three surf clam vessels, all participants in one of the first and oldest ITQ fisheries, sank in a two-week period. Ten fishermen were lost. Has any other fishery, regardless of how it is managed, undergone such a loss in such a short time in a series of unrelated incidents? (This series of sinkings also marked the last time that there was a significant move to require operator licensing.)

Fishing has always entailed a certain amount of risk, risk it’s hard for the land-bound to imagine. While we’re never going to change that, we might be able to reduce it. However, we have to know how we’re doing relative to the past in our domestic fisheries and relative to the present in similar fisheries in other countries. We need to know if licensing makes a difference, if experience is a valid substitute for formal training and licensing, if our fishermen are getting as much as they can get from the safety technology available, if management mandates force fishermen to work under adverse conditions against their better judgment, if the age/experience of the captain and crew matters, and dozens of other things. Let’s look very carefully before we start leaping. We owe it to the memories of the crews of the Lady of Grace, the Lady Luck and every other fisherman who’s been lost at sea to get it right.    

Nils E. Stolpe