Releases – July 15, 2010
Do you have a boat that you’ve built or restored? Show it off! Every July, dozens of boats from all over the region pour into downtown Wilmington for the annual Cape Fear Community College Boat Show.
This year marks the 11th annual CFCC Boat Show on July 24, 2010. Presented by the CFCC’s two boat building programs, the show serves as an annual celebration of the craft of boat building. Held on the banks of the Cape Fear River in downtown Wilmington, CFCC’s boat show attracts thousands of visitors every year. New this year, organizers are opening up the show to professional boat dealers and boat building material suppliers from around the region to create a more comprehensive exhibit and provide information about modern boat building techniques along with traditional wooden boat building methods.
According to Ed Verge, CFCC’s lead boat building instructor, the event has gotten bigger each year and with the addition of professional boat builders, he hopes to attract even more visitors.
“The show is all about craftmanship. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to build a boat, whether you are making a small kayak by yourself or building a 55-foot yacht as part of a team,” Verge said.
In the past, the event featured dozens of wooden boats of all shapes and sizes. Displays included hand-made kayaks, sailboats, powerboats, rowing skiffs, and boats from the Simmons Sea Skiff Club. The entry fee for amateur boats is $50 and $100 for commercially-made boats. All entrants will receive a t-shirt and dinner after the show.
Students in CFCC’s two boat building programs will exhibit their own work in wooden and fiberglass boat building. CFCC’s boat building shops will be open for self-guided tours.
The boat show also features the “CFCC Build-A-Boat” event, where members of the general public can sign up to build a small wooden row boat from a pre-built kit with help from a CFCC student advisor. The cost of building a boat is $450 per team. All teams get to keep the boat they build and proceeds benefit student scholarships.
To enter a boat or sign up to build your own, contact (910) 362-7403 or visit www.cfcc.edu/boatshow.
Saltwater fishermen in North Carolina may get interviewed for recreational fishing surveys this summer at times and in places they’ve never been interviewed before.
The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries has expanded its recreational fishing survey program to improve the quality and quantity of information it gathers for catch and effort statistics. These statistics are essential for making decisions about what size and bag limits are needed to ensure sustainable fish populations.
The division has hired six additional port agents to interview anglers about their catch at times and places where they haven’t been interviewed before. The newly hired staff brings to 28 the number of port agents.
“In the past, we have only been able to assume that anglers catch about the same thing at night as they do during the day. We haven’t had a structured nighttime sampling program,” said Doug Mumford, recreational statistics coordinator for the division. “With these expansions, we will have port agents surveying anglers at night to see if that is true.”
Port agents are also interviewing anglers to determine how many may use private water access sites, which have been left out of survey efforts in the past.
“We plan to increase our survey program by 5,000 interviews, which will provide more accurate recreational catch statistics as well as additional biological data,” Mumford said.
Expansion of the survey program is a critical part of the implementation of the Coastal Angling Program in North Carolina. The Coastal Angling Program is collectively how the division refers to all its recreational fishing data collection programs. It has been made possible through a grant provided by Coastal Recreational Fishing License sales.
Other components of the Coastal Angling Program include: using addresses and telephone numbers from the Coastal Recreational Fishing License to increase the contact rate of those contacted for surveys; using an electronic reporting system as an alternative method of conducting surveys; developing a survey to capture flounder gigging catch and effort; sampling upper estuarine waters for anadromous species such as striped bass; and participating in the Marine Recreational Information Program, a national survey program.
For more information, contact division Recreational Statistics Coordinator Doug Mumford at (252) 948-3876 or Doug.Mumford@ncdenr.gov.
The Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board has approved Draft Addendum II to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass for public comment. The Draft Addendum proposes two changes to the striped bass management program: (1) an increase in the coastal commercial quota, and (2) revising the definition of recruitment failure based on Technical Committee advice.
The proposal to increase the coastal commercial quota is intended to improve equality between the commercial and recreational fishery sectors. Although Amendment 6 established management programs for both fisheries based on the same target fishing mortality rate, the implementation of state-specific quotas for coastal commercial harvest (and not for recreational harvest) has prevented the commercial and recreational fisheries from responding equally to changes in striped bass population size. Since 2004, coastal commercial harvest has decreased by 3.6 percent, while recreational harvest has increased by 13.7 percent. Under the option, the Board would select a percent increase to be applied to the coastal commercial allocations assigned in Amendment 6.
The Management Board voted to include a second issue in the Draft Addendum based on information presented at the meeting. As part of its review of the juvenile abundance indices, the Striped Bass Technical Committee recommended to the Management Board a revision to how striped bass recruitment failure is defined. Juvenile abundance indices are an important component of the striped bass monitoring program and are used to determine periods of recruitment failure which can trigger management action under Amendment 6. Adopting the proposed recommendation would result in a fixed value to determine recruitment failure in each surveyed area rather than a value that changes from year to year. Use of either the Amendment 6 definition or the Technical Committee recommendation for recruitment failure does not result in any necessary changes to the current management program.
It is anticipated that the majority of states will be conducting public hearings on the Draft Addendum. A press release will be issued once the details of the hearings have been finalized and the Draft Addendum is available for public comment. For more information, please contact Nichola Meserve, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at (202) 289-6400 or nmeserve@asmfc.org.
In June NOAA launched a new federal website meant to answer oil spill response questions with clarity and transparency—a one-stop shop for detailed near-real-time information about the response to the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill. The website incorporates data from the various agencies that are working together to tackle the spill, and it can be found at www.geoplatform.gov/gulfresponse.
Originally designed for responders who make operational decisions to the oil spill disaster, the mapping tool integrates the latest data on the oil spill’s trajectory, fishery closed areas, wildlife and place-based Gulf Coast resources—such as pinpointed locations of oiled shoreline and daily position of research ships—into one customizable interactive map.
The launch of the public site is designed to facilitate communication and coordination among a variety of users—from federal, state, and local responders to local community leaders and the public. The site is designed to be fast, user-friendly, and constantly updated.
Beyond NOAA data, the site includes data from Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, the Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA, NASA , U.S. Geological Survey, and the Gulf states. Agencies contribute data through the response data sharing mechanism within the command posts. This includes posting geospatial data on a common server, allowing access and use for multiple spatial platforms.
Developed through a joint partnership between NOAA and the University of New Hampshire’s Coastal Response Research Center, the site is a web-based GIS platform designed specifically for response activities where it is necessary to coordinate with various federal, state, and local agencies. The site will serve as the official federal source for map-based data.
