New App facilitates Port Royal Sound fishing tournament

Beaufort, S.C. (WSAV) – Port Royal Sound Foundation is hosting the first annual Inshore Slam fishing tournament. It will be facilitated through a new app that will give the public an opportunity to ‘cast for conservation’.

This Friday is the beginning of the Inshore Slam; a 10-day tournament that gets the fishing community involved through what researchers call – citizen science. Any person of age can register for the event, and you don’t even need a boat to participate. You can fish from a dock, from a beach, or from a boat landing – and citizen participation doesn’t have to extend over the full length of the ten days.

“You can fish one day, you can fish six, you can fish the full ten,” says Chris Kehrer, team member at Port Royal Sounds Maritime Center, “But this really gives everybody the opportunity, you know, people that are working and they only have the weekends to fish, people that have odds and end jobs.”

The tournament will be facilitated through the MyCatch app, which will give fishermen an idea of what fish are caught and where they are caught. The focus is on redfish, flounder and spotted sea trout, but all species count – even small. The data from that goes back to fisheries biologists at the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to get a greater understanding of what the local waterways look like.

“We’re working with a Canadian group called the Anglers Atlas. It’s a group that works kind of between the fishing community and the fisheries biologists to record data that allows those researchers to figure out about fishing populations and where they are in migrations,” says Courtney Kimmel, Research Coordinator at Port Royal Sounds Maritime Center. “You would catch a fish, you would take a picture of it. It would geotag that picture or that entry. And that’s how they’re tracking who’s catching what.”

Kimmel explains that though it tracks through geotagging, it will not give up local fishermen’s ‘secret’ spots. “At the end of the day, it gets masked, and that data gets made available to researchers to figure out what’s going on in that particular body of water.”

The importance of this tournament and this applies in a huge conservation effort that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish themselves. Kehrer notes, “The Port Royal Sound area is such a vast tidal estuarine body of water, it’s very difficult for any one group to focus efforts on collecting as much quality data as possible. So, this is an opportunity for us to get this widespread blanket to understand a snapshot of what these fisheries look like.”

The tournament is presented by Beaufort Boat and Dock Supply and the Captain’s meeting & Awards dinner will be catered by The Salty Dog.

There will be over $10,000 in cash and prizes. It starts September 27th and ends October 6th. MyCatch will be available to use in the tournament and any time after.

For more information on registration and the MyCatch app, go to portroyalsoundfoundation.org/inshore-slam.