There already are cameras on most of the long line commercial boats, and actual human observers on ALL the Trawlers. I dealt with the human ones since they started Archipelago and most of them were hippy kids who wouldn't do any dishes evenbut ate the boat out of grub or either puked cause they couldn't get over their sea sickness, friggin panty wastes anyways. Their numbers were so far outta wack it was insane, what they thought was say 20,000 lbs of fish was more like 5,000 lbs, that sort of thing happened all the time and the fishermen were paying LARGE cash to have them on board too. Then you go to unload at the dock and you have to pay another "Port Monitor" $75 an hour to redo all the mistakes that the on-board observer made. And even though you still need the guy in town to tally the proper weights, it adds up to an exuberant amount of money every trip to pack around some ex logger protester/ dread lock queen with an attitude that thinks he knows everything about anything when it comes to fish, but can't tell the difference between a dover sole and a friggin turbot, brutal I tell ya, just brutal. The camera does a good job as they also have to have mandatory boards mounted on the side of the boat with color codes and such, and they can tell if the fish coming aboard is legal or not {in length, species, yaddda yaddda etc etc . Much more cost effective as well.
edit to add,
I should also mention that there was some good observers as well that helped out a lot with the goings on while aboard and as the program progressed it got better {just like most things do}.
And contrary to what many on here believe, the commercial fishermen don't all want to go out and slaughter the entire stock of the specific species their after, if they did they would be out of a job in no time, most just want a decent price for the bit of fish their allowed so they can keep their livelihood and support their families.
Now that "brailing" is mandatory on all seiners and it does slow down production and when you only have a 12 hour opening then every minute out there counts and you get sloppy with discarding fish as seen on the telly but in the end the mandatory brailing is much better for the fish as before we used to be able to stern ramp the works and powerful boats could ramp as many as 6 or 7 thousand pieces at a time which was not too good for species like coho, chinnook <{most of the time}and steelhead that were non retain-able to the commercial fisherman.
I'm retired now and i don't like seeing any of these fish go to waste and i never did while i was working either as i think there is a market for all the fish we caught, but only in a perfect world would you be able to catch exactly what is allowed, there will ALWAYS be some by-catch, it's inevitable, but supply and demand allows it and will continue to allow it as long as the world wants to eat fish that you buy out of the grocery store, whether it be here in Canada or anywhere in the entire world. It's just the way it is, and for the average sportu that has never stepped foiot aboard a commercial vessel and seen it in action it will be hard for them to understand the goings on and why it is the way it is.......and i totally understand that as well so I tend to lose my bias attitude nowadays and just rant the ODD time, LOLLOL,
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Topic: 'alleged" illegal fishing techniques by commercial fisherman caught on film (Read 23003 times)