new monitoring service provider for Crab fishermen choose
Crab fishermen who set their traps in Hecate Strait have chosen a new company to monitor their fishery.
In a balloted vote, the fishermen voted to give Ecotrust Canada the contract as the monitoring service provider for the Area A Crab Association, replacing Archipelago Marine Research, which had previously held the contract for the last 11 years.
Todd Johansson, a shellfish resource manager with the Department of Fisheries & Oceans (DFO), said over 50 licence-holders from Area A participated in the vote. Aside from Ecotrust & Archipelago, he said Pacific Coast Fisheries Services also bid on the contract. While he could not release the final tally, he said the winner needed to have a majority of the licence-holders’ votes.
The Area A dungeness crab fishery is one of the more lucrative and sustainable fisheries in the North Coast of B.C. It stretches north from Vancouver Island to Alaska, from Hecate Strait on the east and to the western coast of Haida Gwaii. According to The Economics of British Columbia’s Crab Fishery, a DFO report published last year, Area A’s gross revenues for 2007 were estimated to be $18.4 million – about $3.5 million more than the other six crab fisheries combined.
This year, there will be 53 licence-holders in Area A fishing for crab, and they must have monitoring equipment on their boats, such as cameras and global-positioning systems (GPS), which help manage the fishery. Under DFO policy, each of the seven areas must have one service provider to monitor and manage the fishery.
And this year in Area A, the operator that will run this equipment – the monitoring service provider – is Ecotrust Canada, as voted on by a majority of the crab fishermen.
“We are proud to now be onboard, working with the fleet as the electronic monitoring system evolves,” said Tasha Sutcliffe, the fisheries & marine program director at Ecotrust, in a blog posting on the company’s website. “We know the more effective the monitoring system is, the more it will contribute to the sustainability of this fishery.”
Devlin Fernandes, who works in Ecotrust’s office in Rupert, said the monitoring equipment will arrive in February, and testing of the equipment will happen soon after that. She said Ecotrust has signed a one-year contract with the potential for renewal.
As Ecotrust steps in as the monitoring agent, Archipelago steps out. The company that created the monitoring system for the Area A Crab Association, Archipelago had held the contract since 2000.
“The Area A fishermen were very happy with our quality of service and could not say enough good things about the staff,” said Shawn Stebbins, president & CEO of Archipelago, in an email. “Unfortunately a contractual question came up regarding intellectual property rights. With this issue unresolved, Archipelago is not able to continue providing services to the Area A Association.
“If we can work past this issue we would be happy to resume services at some point in the future.”
While monitoring the crab fishery was not the only part of Archipelago’s business in Rupert, Stebbins said it accounted for 30 per cent of the company’s work in the North Coast. He said the office will remain in Rupert.Read More ...
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