Vessels

Vessel Operating Units

Prior to 1970 the Bureau of Fisheries and the U.S. Fish Commission, which were the predecessor agencies of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), collected little information on vessels actively participating in commercial fisheries. In 1979 NMFS initiated a system that provided data on vessels that actively participate in commercial fishing during each calendar year. The object of this system is to provide an inventory of vessels that answer two fundamental questions:

How many vessels are fishing commercially?
What are the characteristics of these vessels?

This inventory only includes vessels that:

are greater than five net tons
have a current US Coast Guard documentation number.

This system is referred to as the NMFS vessel operating units. There is data for the years from 1979 to 2002.

Because the vessel operating units data only include larger documented vessels, a count of the smaller, undocumented boats was conducted once a year by NMFS and state port agents from 1979 to 1995. Unlike the vessel operating units data, characteristics of the individual boats are not recorded. These annual counts of boats are referred to as boat and shore data.

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David Gloeckner

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Vessels

Fisheries Statistics

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