Is it just me...?

[CaptTB]

Originally Posted by Irish Jigger

Couldn't this be been done on any day, on any boat, during the regular fluke season? All summer we fileted our fish at the dock, put the racks in a bag, tagged them, and put them in Petes freezer. I love fluke fishing and my season is over unless i want to pay to go on a party boat while my boat sits at the dock. I am all for the research 100% but its a tough pill to swallow watching the rsa boats going out fluking while iam in my slip waiting for the bass run.

What is being confused here (and that is partly my fault since my posts are so friggin long winded I don't blame all of you for not reading every word)
is the "research" part of this.

Yes, data is being collected from the boats actually doing the trips.

However, that is NOT the research being paid for with the purchase of the quota. Any data collected from the RSA trips themselves is a BONUS and is ABOVE AND BEYOND the research that is paid for with the purchase of the quota by these boats and the commercial boats.

There is a whole list of research projects that are currently being funded either in part or in whole with the money generated from the sale of the RSA quota from each species. Some research gets funded with quota from several species (it is irrelevant what the fish is, it is the money generated from the sale of those fish that pays for the research)

These projects are submitted to the MAFMC in 2009. They are then approved for the 2010 fishing year (some projects span multiple years) and quota is assigned to them to then be sold and help pay for or offset the estimated costs of those projects.

Early in 2010 the quota is auctioned off, and the money is then given to the research projects based on how much quota was assigned to each project and subsequently how much that quota sold for per pound.

The fact that additional data like lengths and weights is collected when those fish are actually harvested is simply additional data that did not cost anything to collect.

Here is an example of a few projects that were funded in the past couple years: (project name in italics, recipient of funds in bold)

Discard Mortality in the Summer Flounder Fishery: A New Approach to Evaluation - National Fisheries Institute

Data collection and analysis in support of single and multispecies stock assessments in the Mid-Atlantic: Northeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program Near Shore Trawl Program - Virginia Institute of Marine Science

2008 Fishery Independent Scup Survey of Hard Bottom Areas in Southern New England Waters - Charles Borden and Eric Rodegast

Evaluation of Summer Flounder Discard Mortality in the Bottom Trawl Fishery - Cornell Cooperative Ext. of Suffolk County

Development of a Supplemental Finfish Survey Targeting Mid-Atlantic Migratory Species - National Fisheries Institute