Reporting procedures for the continuous fishing method

Information about catch and effort from the fishing fleet is vital for evaluation of the management of krill. The continuous trawling method requires adapted reporting procedures compared to traditional trawling. The present reporting procedure of 2-hour intervals has demonstrated imprecise and with some systematic errors in positioning the catch. In previous EMM meeting we proposed extending reporting frequency to 6-hour intervals to remove some of the methodological negative impacts on the quality of catch data. In this paper, we report a new evaluation of the reporting method. We find that it is possible to maintain present reporting frequency with improved positioning of the catch, but at the cost of a high uncertainty in the individual 2-hour catches. We still consider a 6-hours reporting interval more relevant for the purpose of producing relevant, reliable catch information until alternative approaches using instrumented observation of krill density in the mouth opening of the trawl as a measure to predict spatial catch distribution.