The harvest of tuna specifically when it begins and ends?
MCM: Usually, and I say this because the last two years has changed somewhat, but as a rule, begins in late April and lasts until October. In these last two years we started earlier in February several boats were catching tuna, I call your attention to the fact that POPA acts only on ships with more than twenty meters, the smallest boats of tuna fish begin even earlier. There are indeed some changes at that level, but we can talk from May to October.
But why these changes occurred, what has changed?
MCM: The fleet itself has changed, nowadays, are more and more boats, when I speak of fleet vessels are more than twenty meters wide, are currently registered about 20. At the end of the season the boats have to gather to the yard, make their revisions and smaller vessels, in this context, begin the harvest sooner. Then we have climatic conditions that also change, never have a year equal to the other from this point of view and it also implies that species may be present or not. The fact is that the past two years started earlier does not mean that next season fishing is done a little later, or begins earlier, because on one hand, there is a chance the boats could go earlier for the water and secondly, there is the presence of species in Azorean waters.
At the beginning of the program there was some resistance from fishermen?
MCM: Yes there was what is natural, there was no experience of such programs on board, observers were the people that the masters and crews were not used to, there was a phase of habituation, currently this is outdated and rarely do we have an issue.
Not even when one element is female?
MCM: Yes, because as you know women are not a constant presence in the fishery.
But not only that, there is also a belief that women bring bad luck.
MCM: In fact there are these superstitions; we already had on board a female investigator. Obviously, the game is a very masculine, hard work and as a rule traditionally has no women on board, but I think nowadays we overcome this issue.
Addressing the fishery itself, there is a decrease in tuna fishing in the Azores, the decrease in derivative fitoplacton?
MCM: It is a general question, I cannot say whether there was a decrease in fitoplacton oceans, I can talk about what happens in terms of fishing in the Azores. If species have no food has to go to any other feeding sites for years that this phenomenon happens more than others, but since there is POPA since the beginning, there are no evidence of this phenomenon in the catches of tuna. In 2001, 2002 were bad years of fishing in the Azores, but then we had many good years, I'm talking about a timeframe of 15 years. Of course things were very different 30 years ago and probably had more tuna, naturally. But all this to say that 2007 was an exceptional year and 2009 compared to 2001 was very good. There are two species that sustain crop in the Azores, are the species called beautiful and the bigeye are the most captured. So there are several changes whether the environmental point of view, sometimes the temperature of the water is warmer in a given month and the next year is cooler, it also influences the data, and then there's another thing we cannot forget that is the fishing effort, we are talking about a migratory resource, not something ours explored in the Azores, we capture a small part. In Atlantic global terms were caught 80 thousand tons of bigeye in 2004 according to FAO and in the Azores we are talking about 4000 specimens caught, fishing here is done by pool and line it is seen as a sustainable fishing, but there are other large surface as the siege, about 40% are caught by "fishing aggreging devices" whose fishing effort is much larger than the jump and rod it only happens practically in the Azores, on the African and Brazilian coast.
So if POPA does not notice a decline in terms of catches in the Azores and the size of fish has declined?
MCM: As fisheries coordinator, my obligation is to collect and make it available to researchers and other groups working in these areas, such information must be obtained from people who investigate this area. I, as for sizes, can say that depends on the years and there are times when they are larger, this year's bigeye had considerable sizes, we have no knowledge of a marked decrease in the size of species caught in the Azores.
