Boaters Urged to Report Poorly Marked Fishing Gear
The RYA has revealed a significant lack of data relating to poorly marked fishing gear and is reminding boaters to report all observations and entanglements.
 
Since the launch of the RYA’s online form in May 2017, just 85 reports have been submitted despite considerable anecdotal evidence that incidents occur much more frequently. However, the reporting of 58 entanglements and 27 observations has proved useful in identifying hot spots around the country and the RYA has now published a ‘heat map’ of poorly marked fishing gear based on the incident reports.
 
The RYA’s fishing gear entanglement report provides a simple-to-complete electronic form in an attempt to collate quantitative data to support boaters’ concerns. Data is essential to support negotiations on improving the visibility of static fishing gear for collision avoidance and the RYA is relying on boaters to report incidents.
 
The online reporting form is readily available on the RYA website at www.rya.org.uk/go/entanglements.