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The documents presented by Blue Marine Foundation and carried out by the NGO OceanMind (2020, 2022) suggest that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the Spanish fleet has fished within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Indian Ocean coastal countries without any access agreements to their waters. Following these mentioned documents and being asked by the Spanish shipowners’ associations of purse seine fleet, a revision and verification of the setting positions and other activities registered in the databases has been carried out. Focus has mostly been directed on nearly 10000 positions registered next to coastal countries in the mentioned period, typed out by the sampling staff from the fishing logbooks collected in the Indian Ocean from the year 2016 to the year 2021. This revision has been performed by comparing the registered positions in the logbooks and those registered in the local datasets and in official vessel monitoring systems (VMS) which have been mapping fishing activities for the period of study. All the positions were verified disaggregated (latitude and longitude points), as reported to the CPC by the vessels, including the revision of 2021 data.
The result of these verification process but for the period between 2016 and 2020 has already been reported as technical advisory reports in 2020 (IEO 20203) and in 2022 (IEO 20224). This document is a summary of both documents, including some more progress on the verification process.
Some wrong values were detected and have been corrected in keeping with the same criteria and supported by VMS positions, which have been adopted by many fisheries worldwide for compliance purposes.
The proposal of this verification was scientific, in order to find any biases in the position registration process and with the purpose of providing a new catch and effort data from 2016 to 2020 including these punctual corrections.
Several available EEZ layers were overlapped to approach a pool of data next to coastal countries to work with.
