Fisheries VMS Domain · Lesson 10 of ∞ · Second pass · ← Lesson 9
Second pass · the half e-Boat doesn't own, in detail
Lesson 6 established that eFish owns catch reporting so e-Boat doesn't have to. This lesson goes one level deeper into what that reporting actually looks like — useful the moment a real eFish payload lands on your desk.
An ERS (Electronic Reporting System) replaces the paper fishing logbook with structured messages sent during a trip rather than a story reconstructed afterward. The EU's ERS — the most mature, best-documented implementation, and the one Ukraine's reform visibly takes cues from — is built around a small set of message types, each covering one moment in a trip's life:
| Message | What it records | When |
|---|---|---|
| DEP (Departure) | Vessel leaving port, gear on board, intended area | Before fishing starts |
| CAT / DCA (Catch) | Species and quantity caught, by fishing operation | During the trip, per haul or per day |
| TRA (Transhipment) | Catch moved to another vessel at sea | If/when it happens |
| COX / COE (Entry/exit of an area) | Crossing into or out of a regulated zone | On crossing |
| POR (Prior notification) | Advance notice of intent to land, for port-side inspection planning | Before landing |
| EOF (End of Fishing) | Declares the trip's catch record final — the logbook cannot be corrected after this message | End of trip |
Source: Electronic Reporting System — overview, ISSF glossary — ERS.
EOF is a one-way door. Once a trip's logbook is finalised, it's evidence, not a draft — any post-hoc correction has to happen through a separate, auditable amendment process, not by editing the original record. This is the same instinct behind e-Boat's own violation history requirement (C-052..C-065): a record of what was detected, and when, has to survive even if the underlying understanding changes later.
Separate from the logbook itself, a landing declaration — what was actually brought ashore — must typically be submitted within a fixed window after landing (24 hours, in the EU system). This is the number that gets cross-checked against the logbook's catch messages. A mismatch here is the concrete, operational form of the "Unreported" IUU failure mode from Lesson 2: not a missing report, but two reports that don't agree.
e-Boat has no DEP/CAT/EOF messages of its own — that vocabulary lives entirely on the eFish side. What e-Boat contributes to this picture is independent: a position and geofence record that exists whether or not the vessel ever files a logbook message at all. The genuinely useful capability — one neither system has alone — is the cross-check: does the vessel's declared activity (eFish) match its observed activity (e-Boat)? That comparison is exactly the kind of analysis the C-127..C-133 integration boundary exists to make possible, even though building the comparison logic itself isn't explicit in the current ToR scope.
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