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 of all, 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. Secondly, since this was a voluntary 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. The goal of this project was to have a minimum of 200 fisheries management stakeholders from New England receive instruction in collaborative decision making. Seven workshops were held, two in Massachusetts and Maine and one each in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The curriculum was appropriate and met the goal of introducing the concept of collaborative decision making. All the evaluations were very good with a couple of exceptions.