The first question is was there a difference in gear  performance.  Here are charts put together during the cruise showing door spread for Area One and Area Two.  I do not have either a chart or the data on door spread for Area Three. Even the chart dyslexic should have seen a significant difference between blue and red, especially in Area One.  As anyone who deals with trawls knows, if the door spread is different, the headrope height will be also.

The second question is did this and other difference affect catch.  The total catch for the Seabreeze relative to the Albatross varied in the six sets of data (Gear/Area) between 4 and 9.5 times.  A difference in total catch is not necessarily important if the relative catches are similar both in species mix and size distribution. But, that difference should be constant area to area for the "protocol" gear.  If there is no catchability issue with the different gear configurations (Gear Zero and Gear One) that same relative catch mix and size distribution should hold for each gear.   It did not.  And the difference in relative catch did not hold constant either.  One can look at this issue in a number of ways.

 A significant issue for monkfish is presence/absence in the catch.  While catches can be adjusted when attempting to restore the survey data, no decision as to how to treat absence has been determined.  In Area One monks were present in three out of nine tows with Gear One and the same with Gear Zero. That in each set one of the presence marks is made by 0.01kilo is a different issue and unfortunately the Seabreeze did not measure very small fish.   The Seabreeze had monks in 8 out of nine tows in the companion tows to Gear One and only 5 out of nine tows in the companion tows to Gear Zero. Even more disturbing is Winter Skate which the Seabreeze caught in four tows companioning Gear One and three tows. companioning Gear Two.  The Albatross did not catch a one!  I guess you could say the gear worked equally poorly but as winter skates are coming under management, this does not bode well. The Albatross also was skilled at avoiding Dogfish.

Another concern is was the species mix similar.  In area three comparing gear one with gear zero for the Albatross results in very different species mixes.  Another way to look at this same data - which I like but so far no one else understands is here unadjusted for difference is catch rate, and here adjusted.  Areas One and Two were dominated by one (haddock) or two (whiting and herring) species so that any issue of relative order of catch was for species much further down the list.  Relative catch varied greatly, over  1000% for species that were caught in all four sets of data that compose each area.  Relative catch for those that were only caught in one gear configuration or only by the Seabreeze is even more of an issue.  Here is an example for Area Two - its between the other two as to the extremes.

A last issue is did the gear catch the same size distribution of the different species?  At the moment there are two problems with deciding this question - there has to have been enough samples to get a good comparison and I don't have the data from the Seabreeze in a usable form.  This appears somewhat a mote point, as the species mixes were so different. But, I do love charts so here is the total length samples from all areas combined for Monkfish

I understand there is to be a workshop in January to review the data.