I UNC Sea Grant 



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April 1983 



Doc 



COAST 4 WATCH 



Illustration by Neil Caudle 



Gadgets that changed fishing 



forever 



Today's captain may spend more time peering into 

 video screens and printouts than he does peering into 

 water. 



Fishermen today won't leave the dock without their 

 solid-state circuits, their transducers, their computer 

 chips. They listen for fish with electronic ears. They 

 sail to sea and home again on the pulse of a radio 

 wave. 



The value of North Carolina's seafood catch has 

 doubled in the past five years, to a single-year record 

 of $60 million for the dockside value. Many fishermen 

 will tell you they would never have landed that much 

 seafood without the new generation of electronics. 



Others will argue that new gear has made our fleet 

 so efficient, so adept at raking in the catch, that we're 

 fishing ourselves out of business. The new gear is so 



easy to use, they say, that new fisher- 



men can jump into business and be com- 



petitive more quickly than ever before. 



"It (electronic gear) probably does have some ef- 

 fect, because it increases efficiency," says Mike 

 Street, of the N. C. Division of Marine Fisheries. 

 "Whether that is a significant factor in putting 

 pressure on stocks, I don't know." 



And, it's not only the commercial fleet that's laying 

 out hard cash at the electronics store. Sportsfishermen 

 by the thousands are wiring their boats and compar- 

 ing wattages. 



This month, Coastwatch looks at marine 

 electronics — who needs them, how they work, and 

 what we did before we had them. 



