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Information on the different activities and their time allocation is critical to understand fishing fleets‟ behavior, to elucidate the unit of fishing effort and to derive informative abundance indices to track changes of fish stocks. The Maldives handline yellowfin tuna fishery, which targets adult and sub-adult yellowfin tuna, is a relatively new fishery that began around mid-2000. This paper aims to reveal the different activities and their time allocation for the fishery using logbook data. Examination of the logbook data for 2017 and 2018 showed bait fishing to require substantial effort in terms of time spent, where around 22% of all daily records reported solely bait fishing. A slightly lower proportion of days were where baiting and fishing both occurred on the same day. About 64% of the days at sea for the entire dataset were where just tuna fishing was reported. The data also contributed to some degree, insights on time allocation for searching/steaming and time spent fishing. The exercise emphasized the importance of studying the dynamics of the handline yellowfin tuna fleet and the importance of widening the observer program and implementing a VMS program that would enable improved understanding of the fleet dynamics.
