Trawl Catch in Early Years

[chantelwetzel-noaa]

After our team meeting last week, I dug into where the trawl catches were occurring early in the PacFIN years. It appears there were quite a few small landings being assigned to copper rockfish across a large number of fish tickets. For example, in 1982 where the trawl landings are the highest north of Point Conception reaching a total of 26.2 mt these landings were from 492 different fish ticks and from 42 vessels. The recorded market category on many of these fish tickets was ROCKFISH, GROUP BOLINA (BROWN). The majority of the trawl landings were being brought into San Francisco. Overall, it does not appear to be entirely due to a high specific species composition being applied only a few trawl landings. However, it would still be good to better understand what was occurring in the fishery for these few years that led to these catches.

Landings from trawl gear for each port grouping by year north and south of Point Conception.

The total trawl landings by month for each area between 1982-1985.