Sea Power - July/August 2015

“It’s a total team effort,” Virkaitis said. “Our primary federal partner is NOAA [and its National Marine Fisheries Service]. They don’t have the ships. We have the ships, so we’re charged with being their primary at-sea enforcement in support and in conjunction with NOAA. We do occasionally have NOAA riders come onboard Coast Guard ships.

“We’re all enforcing the same laws, so we do work very closely with them and, every case we get, we make a call to NOAA to decide how we’re going to go forward with it,” he said.

In addition to its domestic responsibilities, the Coast Guard also is an active participant in enforcing commercial fishing agreements on international waters of the North Atlantic, according to Virkaitis. In this capacity, it helps in the rule-making process and provides highly trained personnel as part of international teams that board ships in those areas.

On the local level, “a lot of it is on-the-dock coop-
eration,” he said. “Coast Guard Stations will work with
their counterparts at the state. Most of that coordina-
tion happens at the sectors and the stations very locally
because you’ve got to talk to those guys every day to
build those partnerships.”
On the water, small boats and patrol boats are the
primary assets for Coast Guard enforcement efforts
closer to shore, out to about 20 miles. Farther out, to
the extent of the EEZ, the service uses a combination
of air assets — helicopters and patrol planes — and its
210- and 270-foot Medium-Endurance Cutters. On the
West Coast, the 378-foot High-Endurance Cutters and
new National Security Cutters come into play, as do
the new Fast Response Cutters in the Gulf of Mexico
and Caribbean Sea.

Coordinating these assets to provide the most complete coverage over a wide area is a constant game of chess with a somewhat limited amount of pieces.

“It’s a big ocean,” Virkaitis said. “The flights from Air Station Cape Cod help us out a lot. A cutter’s sphere of influence is maybe 20 miles around, but if you look at the specks on the ocean and the number of fishing vessels out there, it’s a challenge.

“We’re doing roughly 1,200 boardings a year on
fishing vessels [in the First District; the Coast Guard
conducted more than 5,900 such boardings nation-
wide in 2014, according to service statistics], about
10,000 total when you can throw in all the recreational
boardings on top of that. It’s difficult. The regulations
are complicated. Our boarding officers can go onboard
a lobster boat one boarding and then be on a boat drag-
ging for cod and haddock the next boarding, and then
a scallops boarding after that.

“The fishermen, they know the regs pretty well for
what they’re fishing for, but we have to be ready to go on
everything at any time. It is definitely a challenge and we
do the best we can with every tool that we have. “
The Coast Guard maintains five Regional Fisheries
Training Centers — in New Orleans; Kodiak, Alaska;
Cape Cod, Mass.; Charleston, S.C.; and Alameda,
Calif. — to train boarding officers and enforcement
personnel on such techniques as measuring nets and
identifying fish, in addition to proficiency with the reg-
ulations. Boarding officers also have a Boarding Officer
Job Aid Kit to take with them on patrol as a reference
guide of the regulations based on each fishery.

“That’s the primary tool they use out on the water,” Virkaitis said. “You have to have that kind of a reference to refer back to because you have to be consistent. We owe that to the fleet. The other thing is, if we’re not consistent, we’re not going to make good cases. We want to bring good cases that end in successful prosecution.”

The crew of Coast Guard Cutter Tahoma assists the fishing vessel Madison Kate 70 miles east of Chatham, Mass., Dec. 1. Tahoma towed the disabled vessel after Madison Kate suffered a turbine casualty. Along with conducting vessel boardings during fisheries enforcement patrols, the Coast Guard provides assistance to vessels and mariners in distress, and the contact and communications with the fishing fleets and other boats help contribute to maritime domain awareness along the U.S. coastline.