Use and calibration of a quantitative acoustic system on a commercial fishing vessel / by M.R. Wyeth, R.D. Stanley, R. Kieser, and K. Cooke.: Fs97-6/2324E-PDF

"Work by Wilkins (1986) and Stanley et al. (2000) has shown that scientific echosounders aboard large research vessels can be used to estimate the biomass of off-bottom shoals of widow rockfish (Sebastes entomelas, Jordan and Gilbert 1880). However, the operating cost of these vessels limits the extent of acoustic work and the difficulty of scheduling makes it impossible to respond rapidly to unexpected appearances of large shoals. Most commercial fishing vessels now use echosounders, sonar, and precise navigation equipment (GPS) in their daily fishing activities to locate fish, project catch rates, and set their gear (Misund 1997). Thus, relatively little additional equipment is required for these vessels to collect geo-referenced digital acoustic data that can provide a permanent record of fish abundance. The practicality of adapting commercial fishing vessels to supplement and possibly replace research platforms for acoustic surveys has already been successfully demonstrated in Canadian herring assessments (Melvin et al. 1998). They showed that such vessels can serve as viable alternatives to government research vessels. In addition to scheduled use of these platforms, commercial vessels can provide "opportunistic" sampling when significant acoustic signs of fish are encountered during routine fishing. We explored the potential of involving Pacific coast fishers and the acoustic systems on their vessels in groundfish stock assessment research by conducting a joint commercial and research vessel-based acoustic survey of widow rockfish from January 15 to February 8, 1999. … This report summarizes the deployment, operation and intercalibration of the acoustic data logging and analysis system aboard a commercial fishing vessel. It is not to be construed as a review of acoustic hardware or software"--Introduction, page [1].

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