Welcome to Through the Gaps, the UK fishing industry's most comprehensive information and image resource. Newlyn is England's largest fish market and where over 50 species are regularly landed from handline, trawl, net, ring net and pot vessels including #MSC Certified #Hake, #Cornish Sardine, handlined bass, pollack and mackerel. Art work, graphics and digital fishing industry images available from stock or on commission.
Monday 15 March 2021
Why Newlyn needs to grow.
Sunday 14 March 2021
Lessons in fishermen-centered product design
A table holding 15 pieces of paper labeled ‘captain’s journey’ with many small yellow sticky notes on each. The stickies have tiny handwritten notes on them and there’s a pile of colored pends and blank sticky note pads in the lower right corner.
Digital data collection is becoming the norm in every field, including commercial fishing. While there are high tech vessels with constant satellite connections, that’s a fraction of the 2.8m global fleet, including the 75,000 or so commercial fishing boats in the United States[1]. That means fishing software and hardware needs to work with limited connectivity as well as glare, saltwater, and — ideally — big rubber gloves. Many of these products need to feed into regulatory systems, so you’ll have to account for that on the backend, and while you may be in a position to mandate use of your app regardless of usability ignoring UX/UI altogether generally leads to lackluster adoption or worse unintended consequences. All this in a space where public budgets are tight and private profit margins are thin.
These aren’t new challenges for anyone working in civic tech (except maybe the saltwater corrosion) and we’re immensely grateful for the documentation that other designers and product managers have shared about their experiences. We’re offering these reflections in the interest of adding to that body of knowledge and expanding the chapter on fisheries. We had the chance to support a team at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center and support them in applying modern product development practices to a new multi-function platform for fishermen[2]. Here are our takeaways:
The benefits of partnership
We came into the project through a public-private partnership, where the core work was done by an internal team with government funding, while our team had philanthropic funding from the Net Gains Alliance to augment their work and fill gaps. We had strong and dedicated agency partners but it was a small team with a long backlog. We offered general PM support and took on tasks that were easier for an external partner to do. For example, as a number of groups have pointed out, the Paperwork Reduction Act limits federal agencies’ ability to do surveys, especially on topics that are considered to change rapidly like mobile device ownership. We looked at publicly available survey data, but, as we quickly learned, general smartphone trends were not indicative of what devices were in the hands of our target fishermen. Our team had the capacity and flexibility to do design interviews, especially before we had anything to test, and we could add a layer of privacy protection in how we synthesized and stripped personal details out of our reports. Also, we could pay for snacks and coffee, which are essential to good conversations and often excluded from government budgets.
Keep the internal users engaged
The lead developers set up bi-weekly check ins with the internal agency teams, including managers and the staff working on compliance and enforcement. If you’re in the private sector reading this we can hear you rolling your eyes at something that might seem blindingly obvious but treating your agency colleagues as customers who should be engaged with and delighted by your products is still a bit of a culture shift in civic tech, especially in agencies that have not been first in the digital transformation queue, like many natural resource agencies. Agency staff are used to frequent, long meetings; they are less familiar with two-week sprints that result in new wireframes based on the feedback they provided last time. We wrote up some guides for the NOAA Fisheries team (drawing heavily on work from 18F and USDS) that mainly served to reinforce the best practices they were already deploying, tie them to other civic tech efforts, and make them fishier. Getting the internal users accustomed to regular check-ins made discussions easier once we had to start making tradeoffs between fishermen’s and managers’ requirements.
Recruiting fishermen testers took more time than we anticipated
We were doing this in 2020, when COVID-19 meant everything took longer than expected, but still it was quickly clear that we had an uphill job working in a community that was unfamiliar with user testing. Kate’s worked in and around West Coast fisheries for over a decade and contacted fishermen she knew, including ones who’d participated in design sessions on other projects. We had agency staff with longstanding industry relationships help with outreach. We offered to run tests on the weekends, early in the morning and late at night. We tried to set up an in-person testing event, but COVID-19 restrictions shut that down. Overall it took more than a month to build our first testing group and we didn’t get the full range of perspectives we wanted (operating systems, vessel configurations, ports). We asked the people who did participate to recruit their friends and family. Once people had participated, we asked them if they’d be willing to do a second session later we could show how we’d incorporated their feedback, which most agreed to.
We paid them
We asked for an hour of their time and tried to wrap up our discussion on time, although some wanted to talk longer. For that, we offered them $100 in compensation, which some declined. We advertised that we were paying testers in our recruitment emails but this did not seem to affect our recruitment. We made the decision to compensate people before COVID-19 cases started spiking in the U.S. and we were glad we did once ports and seafood supply chains started shutting down and fishermen were tied up at the dock. Even without a pandemic, we support compensating participants when you can as a matter of fairness and because it’s common practice in the private sector, sending a signal that fisheries and natural resource tech is as worthy of good design.
It was worth it
Even with all our constraints we got so many of the great outcomes you want out of design testing: original ‘brilliant’ ideas were scrapped and iterated, testers were delighted by things no one thought of as ‘features,’ small changes brought big delights, and bugs were squashed. Maybe most importantly, the testing sessions offered a dialogue opportunity between agency staff and fishermen based on listening and learning, not regulating. The development team had asked to be on the virtual testing sessions to hear feedback firsthand. We gave testers the option to talk just with us or have agency staff on as well and all opted to let staff participate. This led to some real-time ‘a-ha’ moments about the product design, and about the way the platform would operate inside a larger political and management context, one where the developers had limited control. There were things the apps couldn’t change, but for what they could do, and what they needed to do, they’re doing a better job of it because of testing and the input of fishermen.
[1] FAO 2018 Statistics and that’s an estimate.
[2] We’re saying “fishermen” because that’s the term people asked us to use. There’s a whole paper on “Should we call them fishers or fishermen?” if you want to dive into the terms, and we tried out a few other words like “captain” as we went along but here we’re going with what they asked to be called.
Saturday 13 March 2021
Government Plans To Revive Shellfish Exports By The Winter By Building Purification Sites In The UK
EP fisheries control vote: Two steps forward, one giant step back Published on March 11, 2021
European Parliament votes for modern and transparent fisheries, but opens grave loophole.
The EU Fisheries Control Coalition, where FishSec is a member, applauds the positive steps taken by the European Parliament towards more transparent fisheries and traceable seafood. With their vote in plenary this week, EU parliamentarians have called for all fishing vessels to report everything they catch, including sensitive and protected species, which will make data for over 49,000 EU vessels available for the first time. Further, EU vessels will be tracked through electronic monitoring tools, seafood available in the EU market will be digitally traceable from net to plate, and EU Member States will be required to report more transparently on their control measures.
At the same time, the decision to significantly backtrack on accurate reporting of seafood catches casts a dark shadow over the voting outcome, as up to 40% of catches (and up to 50% in the case of tuna) may now be omitted from the EU fleet’s records. This would undermine scientific data to evaluate the status of fish stocks, could render fisheries control efforts ineffective, and will put the last decade of progress for seafood sustainability and marine species’ recovery at serious risk – as the European Commission itself has warned.
On behalf of the The EU Fisheries Control Coalition, Marta Marrero Martin, Director of Ocean Governance at The Nature Conservancy said: “Today, MEPs displayed the courage needed to turn the tide on overfishing by voting to make Remote Electronic Monitoring mandatory on vessels that are at a high risk of not complying with the rules. This is unfortunately overshadowed by the vote to extend the so-called ‘margin of tolerance’ for fishers, which will allow up to four in ten fish to go missing from the records, signaling a huge blow for sustainability. MEPs and Member States must urgently reverse this course in their upcoming negotiations, while also going one step further by ensuring that cameras record the incidental catch of sensitive and protected species.”
Andrea Ripol, Fisheries Policy Officer at Seas At Risk said: “Today’s vote is a mixed bag for dolphins, seabirds and turtles across the EU. Even though the mandatory collection of data on incidental catches in logbooks is a bold and promising step to help reverse biodiversity loss, the rejection of Remote Electronic Monitoring for data collection on sensitive species undermines its effectiveness, as it is an essential tool to ensure the data is recorded accurately.”
Katrin Vilhelm Poulsen, Senior Seafood Policy Officer at WWF European Policy Office said: “As the EU imports the majority of its seafood, the introduction of digital traceability from sea to plate will bolster the EU’s fight against illegal fishing and lay the groundwork for providing clear information to European consumers. However, this milestone achievement in the fight against illegal fishing internationally is undermined by the parallel decision to legalise underreporting for European vessels.”
Vanya Vulperhorst, Campaign Director, Illegal fishing and Transparency at Oceana said: “We welcome the outcome that all EU vessels – including 49,000 small-scale vessels – will have to report their catches and track their location, and that Member States can no longer hide information about their control efforts from the public. But MEPs’ foolish vote in favour of fishers underreporting up to 40% of their catches risks reversing decades of recovering fish populations.”
Steve Trent, Executive Director at the Environmental Justice Foundation said: “More transparent reporting by EU Member States on their fisheries controls and abolishing their veto to publish fisheries information mean the EU can continue to be a pioneer in the effort for a transparent global fisheries sector. Yet, crucially, the giant misstep of allowing four in ten fish to go missing from the records must now urgently be remedied by MEPs and Member States in their upcoming negotiations.”
Positive outcomes from the European Parliament vote include:
- Fishing vessels of 12 metres length or more that are at high risk of discarding unwanted catches (a violation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy) will be required to use Remote Electronic Monitoring, including CCTV cameras.
- Seafood products will need to be digitally traceable from the point of catch to the point of retail, with the same requirements for products sourced from EU and non-EU countries.
- Thanks to more transparent reporting provisions, European citizens and decision makers will have more information on how EU Member States implement EU fishing rules and manage fisheries resources.
- All EU fishing vessels – including over 49,000 small-scale vessels – are required to have a location tracker and to report their catches.
The negative aspects include:
- The increased margin of error that fishers have to estimate their catches will allow up to 40% of caught seafood to go missing from the EU fleet’s records; in the case of tuna, even up to 50% of catches may now never be reported.
- The requirement of Remote Electronic Monitoring (including CCTV) on vessels to monitor and curb the bycatch of sensitive species, including dolphins, seals and seabirds, has been rejected.
With the European Parliament’s position on the fisheries Control Regulation now adopted, Members of the European Parliament, the representatives from EU Member States and the European Commission are scheduled to begin negotiations to finalise the future fisheries control system later this summer.
It is crucial that the gains secured for sustainable fishing and healthy seas in Wednesday night’s vote are maintained in the trilogue discussions. However, both MEPs and EU Member States must urgently remedy the dramatic increase in the margin fishers receive to estimate their catches. The European Commission has warned that the 40-50% of catches missing from fishers’ logbooks could jeopardise the recovery of fish stocks in European seas, putting the future of fisheries at risk and stands in stark contrast to the goals of the European Green Deal. It is now up to EU parliamentarians, EU Member States and the Commission to make sure the robustness of our fisheries control system will not be undermined by this giant misstep.
Friday 12 March 2021
The harbour is full of boats and the storm hasn't even arrived yet.
It's not just the small visiting beam trawlers chasing soles...
but also some of the biggest in the Brixham fleet like the Georgina, William and Julie of Ladram
along with the biggest beam trawler in the south west, the Enterprise...
the Charisma has had a name change to the Charisma of Ladram reflecting her change of ownership in joining the rest of the Ladram fleet...
the Lucy Too makes her way back to a berth...
plenty of work still be done on the Twilight III...
the MCA has recently posted an M Notice asking skippers to check hydrostatic releases fittings...
a sure sign the weather is poor, there's a French boat in port...
looking at the forecast the trawls on these three won't be being dragged along the sea bed for a day or two yet ...
the weather means the guys on the Unity can set to mending their twin rig trawls.
Thursday 11 March 2021
These guys need more than words.
Even when MPs get the chance to talk directly to a fishermen - in this case skipper David Stevens was sat in the wheelhouse of his trawler - they still seem unable to do anything other than espouse the party line. How on earth is that kind of response going to help him (having recently invested several million pounds in a new vessel) or all the other skippers affected by the deal? These guys don't need platitudes, the fishing support grant - if eligible - is just sticking plaster over a gaping wound.
Scale your brill and buy tinned whiting - God help us!
If it wasn't so serious, this new £200,000 advertising campaign from the Government urging the population to eat more fish would be funny - but it is not - funny that it is.
How can they get it this wrong?
For instance, the campaign material suggests:
- you need to scale brill - brill don't have scales
- you can buy tinned brill?
- you can buy tinned whiting?
- you should keep Dover sole for a few days so the flesh becomes firm
- you can buy Atlantic Wolf fish - there's never been one landed in Newlyn and there will be only a handful of UK boats, if any, catch them on a regular basis
- and you buy turbot, monkfish and scallops - well with a big enough food budget sure - buy most people to eat on a regular basis?