A form was designed for this purpose and given to a number of fishermen. However, no one was interested in filling it out. There were several good reasons why this happened. First, much of the information requested was duplicative of information that fishermen are required to include in their vessel trip reports, so they couldn't understand why they should have to fill out two forms. Second, because this was a volunteer program, it was impossible to sustain the fishermen's interest once the observer was off the boat.
Fishermen generally prefer making a phone call to writing information down on paper.
Perhaps in the future, a phone-in system could be used to obtain more detailed catch and effort information from selected fishermen.