The sampling period was from June 30, 1998 to November 13, 1998. During that time plant workers gathered nearly the same number of sablefish and yellowtail rockfish samples as ODFW port biologists but more than 5 times the Dover sole samples as ODFW port samplers (Table 1).

Table 1. Number of Boat Trips Sampled

	Sablefish	Dover sole	Yellowtail rockfish	Total
Plant Workers	40	86	24	150
ODFW port biologists	46	15	17	78
Quality Control	11	12	10	33
Number of boat trips	756	276	520	1552

Thus, seafood plant workers could potentially at least double the sample size of fish length distributions currently collected by port biologists. However, first we had to assess if plant workers samples were comparable to professional biologists by looking at the results of the 3 objectives.

Objective (1): To assess if plant workers can measure fish lengths
accurately plant worker samples were compared with quality
control and with ODFW port biologist samples

Results indicated that there were statistical differences between the plant worker samples and quality control samples but they may not be of practical importance. For example, there are no visible differences between the three sampler types. The amount of variability seen between the sampler types (ODFW, quality control, and seafood plant worker) measuring fish from the same vessel was similar to the variability seen when quality control samples were taken from different vessels. Therefore we conclude that seafood plant workers can measure fish lengths with adequate precision.

Objective (2): To detect if there were differences between fish length
distributions collected during business hours and non-business hours

The comparisons were limited to a small group of individual samplers because not all plant workers gathered data during non-business hours. The results indicated that there were significant differences between business and non-business hours.

Objective (3): To examine whether fish length distributions collected by
seafood plant workers were similar to fish length distributions
collected by ODFW port biologists

Fish length distributions measured by seafood plant workers were compared with those measured by ODFW port biologists. These comparisons were based on data collected during business hours only. Even though, there was a small statistical difference for Dover sole sampled in Astoria, it was only one port out of three ports and one species out of three species tested. Therefore we concluded that fish distributions collected by seafood plant workers were similar to those measure by ODFW port biologists.