has tended to cancel much of the advan- 

 tage obtained by having a superior vessel 

 and crew. 



The typical bait boat (201-300 tons) 

 has averaged just under 60 percent of the 

 year at sea since 1951 • Minimum sea time 

 was U5 percent in 1955 About 66 percent 

 of the year, or 2l;0 days, were spent at sea 

 in 1958. (See table 5 for data on time at 

 sea, number of trips, length of trip, catch 

 per day of fishing) . Certainly time at sea 

 could be increased appreciably if this were 

 the only consideration. Any way of decreas- 

 ing "turn about time" would contribute to 

 solving the problem of reducing the cost of 

 catching tuna. It has been variously esti- 

 mated that each day of waiting to unload 

 adds about two dollars per ton to cost of 

 catching tuna. 



REDUCTION OF FISHING TIME 



Effects of Knowledge and Skill 



Boat owners and fishermen are con- 

 tinuously seeking ways to shorten time 

 taken to catch loads of fish so that they 

 can reduce cost of production and increase 

 sales. Time reduction is effected by in- 

 formation available to the skippe ■ and his 

 crew and through technological advances. 



The information available to the skip- 

 per, which contributes to his fishing 

 success, is his and his crew's empirical 

 knowledge or accumulated experience, 



current shore reports on fishing conditions 

 obtained before sailing, and information 

 received at sea from other boats. Skippers 

 of purse seiners and albacore vessels tend 

 to exchange information more freely among 

 them than do masters of the bait boats who 

 frequently prefer to operate through small 

 code groups. The purse seine skippers 

 initiated an additional way of getting in- 

 formation in 1958 by employing the scouting 

 service of land based aircraft operating 

 from bases in California and Mexico. The 

 pilots of these planes receive a share of 

 the schools that they find for the boat. 

 The fact that the vessels continue to use 

 this free-lance service attests to its 

 effectiveness. 



There is no question that the empirical 

 knowledge of the skipper and the current 

 information he receives both contribute 

 substantially to minimizing the duration of 

 fishing trips. That some skippers have more 

 knowledge than others and that their supe- 

 rior knowledge permits them to make con- 

 sistently shorter trips is undeniable. 

 We have plotted in figure 5 the average 

 number of days spent on a fishing trip 

 annually (1951-58) for eight of the more 

 successful Class h bait boats (201-300 ton 

 oapacity) , each of which maintained the same 

 skipper from 1951 through 1958, and the same 

 average statistic for the fleet of Class h 

 bait boats (more complete details are given 

 in table 6) . Over these years, the skip- 

 pers with superior knowledge made consist- 

 ently shorter trips - a savings of time in 



Table 5. — Average number of days at sea, length of trip, number 

 of trips and catch per days fishing for a typical 

 Class k ( 201-300 tons) bait. 



Source: Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. 



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