Detailed information on the area 

 fished by the purse-seine fleet is fur- 

 nished from logbook records of daily fishing 

 activities kept by the vessel captains or 

 pilots. Logbooks, together with a chart of 

 the appropriate fishing grounds, are issued 

 to all vessels in the fleet at the beginning 

 of the season. A sample page of the logbook 

 is shown in figure 3. The logbook remains 

 the property of the vessel captain, and 

 duplicate carbon sheets are collected weekly 

 by staff members. 



The charts used for locating the daily 

 fishing activities were adapted from those 

 developed for gathering fishery statistics 

 in the North Atlantic (Rounsefell, 1948). 

 These consist of standard navigation charts 

 of the Atlantic coast divided into the 

 following areas: Gulf of Maine, Southern 

 New England, Middle Atlantic-Chesapeake Bay, 

 South Carolina-Georgia, and Georgia-Florida. 

 A chart of the Southern New England Banks is 

 shown in figure 4. Catch data are recorded 



by unit areas of 10 minutes of latitude and 

 10 minutes of longitude. 



Logbooks were first used in the menha- 

 den purse-seine fishery in the Middle Atlan- 

 tic Area in 1952 and in 1955 were introduced 

 into the fleets in the other areas along 

 the coast. Data relating to fishing grounds 

 exploited by the Middle Atlantic purse-seine 

 fleet from 1952 through 1954 have been 

 summarized by June and Reintjes, 1957, cUid 

 Reintjes and Roithmayr (unpub. ms.) _'. 



In summarizing the data for 1955, the 

 total number of sets within each unit area 

 was tabulated and plotted (figs. 5-7) to 



2/ Survey of the ocean fisheries off Dela- 

 "" ware Bay - Supplemental report, 1954-58. 

 U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau 

 of Commercial Fisheries, Biological 

 Laboratory, Beaufort, N. C. 



FISHING LOGBOOK-PURSE SEINE VESSEL (MENHADEN) 



Figure 3. — Sample page from fishing logbooks issued to menhaden purse-seine vessel capUins. 



