The recent sinking of the fishing vessel Patriot shook Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk and she become more concerned about the safety measures and asked the local fishing industry to support her efforts in making vessel tracking devices a common search and rescue tool. In hi speech in the New Bedford Mayor’s Ocean and Fisheries Council Mayor Kirk raised questions that why the Coast Guard does not consistently use the Vessel Monitoring System or VMS, a satellite-based tracking device that the federal government uses to enforce fishing regulations, to locate distressed fishing vessels.
Brian Rothschild, a fisheries scientist who heads the council, explained that safety problems such as the VMS case could have “easy solutions” under a revised fisheries management system. He told that in Patriot case the Coast Guard used data from the Costa and Corvo’s VMS to successfully locate the vessel when it sank about 115 miles east of Cape Cod.
The Coast Guard’s effort was delayed in its search for the Patriot because they had problems accessing VMS data that would have identified the vessel’s location in fishing grounds about 15 miles southeast of Gloucester Harbor. Mayor Kirk opined that NOAA and the Coast Guard need to collaborate “on a more consistent application for VMS. To solve the VMS problem, the council must first get to the root of the problem, which is better communication between the fishing industry and agencies that regulate the industry, says Dr. Rothschild.
