The Sablefish Catch File

Since mid-1990, fish tickets have not been required for groundfish harvested in the EEZ if the catch is not processed in waters controlled by the State of Alaska. While many processors have continued to fill out fish tickets, some have not. As a result, there is no single source of data that contains all the vessels that harvested sablefish, particularly in the case of catcher-processor boats. The tables in this report that show sablefish catch from 1991 to 1994 use a "blended" dataset from ADFG fish tickets and NMFS Weekly Production Reports (WPR). This dataset was developed in an attempt to provide more accurate harvest estimates.

There are large discrepancies between the sablefish catch that has been reported on fish tickets, and catch that has been reported on WPRs. There are several possibile causes for the differences, which include catcher-processors that fill out WPRs but don't fill out fish tickets, or catcher-processors that fill out fish tickets only part of the time, or errors that have been made in filling out the WPRs and fish tickets, or keypunching data entry errors.

All the boats and all the harvest would not be included in a catch file if one relied only on fish tickets, so WPR records were used to document the sablefish catch from catcher processors. In the case where catcher-processors had filled out fish tickets, the sablefish catch given on the WPR was substituted for the catch that had been documented on fish tickets. This was done to avoid double-counting of harvest for these vessels.

Fish tickets were used to document the harvest for all other boats besides catcher- processors.

WPR records do not contain information on the permit holder who was onboard the catcher-processor. When there were fish ticket catch records for catcher-processors, the permit holder was assumed to be the person listed on the fish tickets. Otherwise, if there were no fish tickets for a catcher-processor, the permit holder and the vessel owner were assumed to be the same person.

The table below lists the year, the total harvest pounds resulting from the CFEC revised and combined sablefish catch data, the total harvest pounds documented solely on WPRs, and the total harvest pounds that were documented solely on fish tickets.

Table A-1. Sablefish harvest pounds from the CFEC

combined and revised data, and harvest pounds as

documented on the WPR and fish ticket data