The 'surveyors' will call people on the list and ask questions. Great!
That leads to these questions:
Will you be prepared to answer their questions?
A properly worded survey should not require you to be prepared, it should ask you the proper questions and you will either remember the information or not.
Have you ever seen a list of what questions will be asked?
CLICK THIS LINK FOR A LIST OF QUESTIONS THEY WILL ASK YOUWhat do these people expect from you as a participant in this phone call survey?
I, for one, do not know what they will be asking. Does it seem foolish to be included in a list for a survey and not know what is needed from you? Can they not tell us what they need to know?
See Above.
Will the phone survey help the fisheries? If so, how?
Theoretically the angler registry will do two things (the survey already exists and has for 30 years) it will cut down the amount of time and effort to contact anglers since instead of a, as MRFSS calls it,
"The CHTS utilizes a computer-assisted, random digit dialing (RDD) approach to contact full-time residential households."
you will instead know that you are calling people who fish. Now, you need only call FISHERMEN until you find one that fished within the last 2 months. Before, you had to first find a fishermen, and then hope it was one that fished within the last two months. Second, it should, again theoretically, give you a much better estimate of participation, since if they are not registered they might not be fishing (obviously non-compliance is already a correction factor they use, whether or not they use it correctly is another question)
Will they ask how many trips you made in the last week, month, year, your lifetime???
The last 2 months.
Will they ask how many fish you caught???
No, that is what the dockside angler intercept is for.
Where you caught them???
Sort of. They ask if you fished boat, partyboat, land, etc. and Inland, ocean, etc. but not specific locations. (no spot burning!
How you caught them???
Sort of, see above.
The size of the fish???
No. That is what the dockside angler intercept is for.
What type of fish???
They do, depending on the region, ask what you were targeting, if anything specific, but not numbers or sizes and not what you actually caught.
The biggest question I have, What will they do with the information that is gathered?
The exact same thing they have always done. It will be used to calculate the recreational catch.
Will the information they gather be accurate?
Is the info they gather now accurate? It will be, no matter how well designed, just a survey and can only be so accurate.
It is my understanding that the federally licensed charter boats already have a survey they must fill out after each of their trips. It is also my understanding that these surveys are sitting, gathering dust, in the basement of an office building somewhere in Woods Hole without so much as being looked at, EVER. What good it that?!?!
That used to be true (the sitting in a basement/closet part) but is no longer. All the information is entered into a computer (Adam and I have all the VTR data from NH to NC for the last decade, minus identifying info like boat name/number)
However, the data is not used to calculate our catch. It is simply (for now and since its inception) a means of permit retention. Don't fill it out, don't get your permit. Fill it out and you get your permit. It is also used to generate revenue. Get caught not filling it out, pay a fine.
The landings data for the for-hire sector is collected through the for-hire survey. An industry version of the MRFSS survey (soon to be the MRIP)
Do you get the feeling, as I do, that this is just another layer of government that we must plow thru to get to do what we have a right to do?
Yes.
What are the guiding forces behind this registry? Is their a hidden agenda?
The first answer is several driving forces, some good, some not. The second answer (this is now all just my opinion) is yes.
Once you are a known universe and have to be "permitted" to fish, that permission can be taken away at any time and limited in its scope and availability.
Can you say "Catch Shares"?
Can you say "Limited Entry"?
Unfortunately, the registry has been listed in not one but TWO NRC reviews of how to improve our landings data. There is no doubt that we will have more accurate (I'm not saying ACCURATE, but more so than before) participation numbers and a more efficient means of contacting anglers. Beyond that, the registry does nothing positive.
CLICK THIS LINK FOR AN OVERVIEW OF THE PROGRAM.
