The Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI), an organization that supports research and development within the seafood industry, recently tested the viability of ropeless fishing gear in Newfoundland and Labrador’s crab and lobster fishery.
While ropeless gear, also known as rope-on-command (ROC) gear, would allow harvesters to fish in areas closed due to the sighting of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, the CCFI has identified a number of issues with the equipment that would need to be addressed before it sees widespread use in N.L.
The evaluation came about after the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) released a call for proposals for reducing the entanglements of right whales in fixed-line fishing gear. According to CCFI’s Managing Director, Keith Hutchings, the first trials of ROC gear centred around the lobster fishery in the Maritimes. A significant amount of testing had never been done off the coast of N.L., especially in the depths required for the crab fishery.
“The main thing here was the crab and the depth of water that it’s fished in, which was different than what has been tested before,” said Hutchings.
Wanting to test the gear’s efficacy off the province’s coast, the CCFI partnered with Ashored Inc. Ashored’s design, known as the Modular Ocean Based Instrument, or MOBI for short, is a metal cage containing a vertical line and buoy that sits on the ocean floor. Upon receiving an acoustic signal from a vessel, the line and buoy automatically release to the surface.
From there, the CCFI teamed up with the Marine Institute (MI) and seven fish harvesters fishing off the Avalon Peninsula, Fogo Island and the Grand Banks.
After some trials at the Marine Institute’s flume tank in St. John’s, N.L. and The Launch facility in Holyrood, N.L., as well as a consultation session with participating harvesters, the CCFI was ready to do at-sea operations with Ashored’s ropeless gear.
The harvesters and the CCFI first noticed the significant size and weight difference between a ropeless trap and a traditional crab pot when storing them on deck.
“How does that process incorporate into the methods today of dropping 50 crab pots or dropping 350 offshore? That’s significant, too, because the actual unit itself is significant — it has a lot of weight. It doesn’t stack like a crab pot; that’s one of the first things a fisherman said,” said Hutchings. “There is some extra weight to it, and in some cases some harvesters said that may mean they need an extra crewmember.”
Initially, the trials also encountered difficulties with water penetration. Whereas the lobster fishery in the Maritimes might fish in depths around 100 feet, the same traps might have to contend with depths of over 1,000 feet in N.L.
“We started at 150 metres and started to get some trouble initially with harvesters and then we started to pull back. Ashored went back — the epoxy and the O-rings, and various things like that — they readjusted. Then we came back with new units. We tested them at the pressure-testing facility here at MI and got them to 100–150 for an hour and then started trials back with harvesters and started to get the kind of results that we were expecting. We got reliability up to about 200–300 metres,” said Hutchings.
Among other issues that necessitated a redesign was the length of rope available in Ashored’s design.
At around 150 feet, the trap wasn’t viable in the snow crab fishery. Battery life was also addressed, as colder temperatures at significant depths drastically reduced the battery life of the ROC units.
Harvesters also showed concerns when it came to locating their pots if there were no high flyers to indicate where they set their traps, as well as identify buoys once they surface.
“In relative terms, a buoy is very small. So, if that comes to the surface, they said, ‘Well, what about if it’s foggy? What if there’s high swells?’ Some harvesters often pull in the nighttime,” said Hutchings. “One of the biggest recommendations was that they’re going to have to deploy or create some type of beacon that will be part of that whole identification on the surface.”
One of the biggest concerns expressed by harvesters was that ropeless gear can be cost-prohibitive. Ashored’s Rope On-Command starter kit comes in at a $9,500 price tag, with each individual MOBI unit costing an extra $2,500.
“How do we integrate that in? Who pays for it? This [gear] is environmentally sustainable, so is there an obligation to support the harvesters in bringing this in from an environmental point of view? They were obviously concerned about the cost of that, because they’re putting one at each end of a string of pots. It’s not really conceivable that you’re going to have one for every pot,” said Hutchings.
For all the setbacks, reservations and criticisms the ropeless gear CCFI tested received, Hutchings thinks that the technology can still work for the N.L. fishery with some fine-tuning and technological advancement.
“I think it can work. We’ve demonstrated that it can work in certain depths. Did we demonstrate that the reliability is there to the level it needs to be? That’s something for someone else to decide,” said Hutchings. “I think it’s going to get there. But it’s like any technology and development — it goes in different stages. As you get to mass production and as you get to that unit at the end, you can look at, ‘OK, how do we decrease the cost of the unit?’ You start backfilling it with other components to make it a little cheaper; you get to bring the cost down, and then that becomes better for the industry in terms of accessing it and having it.”
Ashored and other designers of ropeless gear came away from CCFI’s project with a wide range of recommendations that would make these whale-safe, closure-avoiding pieces of gear better suited to the N.L. crab and lobster fishery.
The final recommendations included reconfiguring the size and shape of units to better allow the stacking and transport of units on deck, improving the ability to identify buoys, increasing the depth that ROC gear can reliably work in and addressing the time it takes to haul in, reset and redeploy gear.
“This was first and foremost about engaging harvesters through the whole process and what you seen in the report and the recommendations and what was identified is what they told us based on use and experience on the water,” said Hutchings.
“I think that’s invaluable to give everybody confidence that the actual people who are going to use this — they were engaged, and here’s their feedback.”
CCFI’s full report on rope on-command gear can be found at www.ccfi.ca/projects.
