Vessel Level Annual Cost-Earnings Study of the Hawaii Offshore Handline Fishery and the Hawaii Small Boat Commercial Fishery, 2014

This study examines the economic performance of the offshore handline fishery and the Hawaii small boat commercial fishery in terms of annual net revenues and annual net returns.

The offshore handline fishery includes a small group of large vessels that used a variety of gear, including pelagic handline, troll, and other specialized gear, to target juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna at offshore seamounts and weather buoys (Itano 1999).

Three segments of fishermen are included in this analysis, including offshore handline fishermen, and those who self-identified in the 2014 Hawaii Small Boat Economic Survey as full-time commercial fishermen or part-time commercial fishermen.

Although not all of the offshore handline fishermen are full-time, hereafter the full-time and part-time commercial fishermen discussed in this report only refer to the small boat fishermen.

We did not perform an economic analysis for fishermen whose self-identified motivations were not commercial, including recreational expense, purely recreational, subsistence, and cultural, because their main purpose for fishing was not for commercial sales. Instead, large portions of their catches were for home consumption or given away (Chan and Pan 2017).

Economic data used in this study were collected from the 2014 Hawaii Small Boat Economic Survey, and the summaries were documented in a 2017 NOAA Technical Memorandum (Chan and Pan 2017).

However, the data summaries in Chan and Pan (2017) did not include the offshore handline fishery because of its unique characteristics that differ from the typical Hawaii small boat fishery. Offshore handline fishermen’s fishing vessels are larger (~45 feet vs. ~23 feet) and better equipped because of the long travel distances to fishing grounds (150–250 miles vs. more active within state waters), multi-day trip lengths (4.9 days vs. single day), multiple crew members (2–5 people vs. 2 people), and large catches per trip of 2,000 to 8,000 pounds for a five-day trip relative to 80 pounds per trip for the small boats (Itano 1999; Chan and Pan 2017).

Chan HL, Pan M. 2019. Vessel level annual cost-earnings study of the Hawaii offshore handline fishery and the Hawaii small boat commercial fishery, 2014. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum NOAA-TM-NMFS-PIFSC-80, 50 p. https://doi.org/10.25923/zffy-5a13.