The Future of Fishing: How Blue Ocean Gear’s Smart Buoys Are Changing the Game

Blue Ocean Gear first made a trip to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the summer of 2022 before applications for the Gulf Blue Navigator opened. When the chief business officer of Blue Ocean Gear, Peter Macy, received an invite to get a first look at the program, he did not hesitate to accept. Familiar with the Gulf Coast from his previous gaming industry role, Macy returned for his first visit since 2005.  

With shrimping vessels trolling, oyster farmers harvesting, and shipbuilders busy on the shore - the Gulf Coast of Mississippi has always been a cornerstone of the blue economy. Today, we see a new blue economy emerging with technology like that of Blue Ocean Gear bringing smart sensors to fixed gear fisheries worldwide.  

The California-based team joined the pilot program of the Gulf Blue Navigator in November of 2022. Since then, they have leveraged the program’s industry connections to test their next generation hardware with a University of Southern Mississippi research vessel, complete a pilot project with local oyster farmers, and run data analysis projects with the talented faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Marine Research Center.  

We caught up with Blue Ocean’s Gear’s Peter Macy to learn more: 

SeaAhead: Can you describe the origins of Blue Ocean Gear? 
 
Macy: Our founder, Kortney Opshaug, was working at NASA and running operations for one of their major research programs. While her PhD is in aerospace engineering, her research focused on underwater robotics. She's always had a passion for the ocean, and while working as a docent at the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary she got to know some fishermen. She recognized there is this big problem with people going out to harvest their crab and shrimp pots without knowing whether or not they had any catch. So, she started developing the technology that would count the catch in your trap, transmit that data to the surface and then transmit it back to the cloud, to the user.  

Recognizing that distinctly knowing where the buoy was located was a huge value to the fishermen, [Opshaug] focused on developing our current product and incorporated in 2019. I joined the company about a year later as the first official employee. 
 
SeaAhead: How does Blue Ocean Gear enable ocean stewardship and push the limits of technology? 
 
Macy: We’re driven as a team by the importance of enabling ocean stewardship through technology, but we're really solving a couple of problems. The first is the elimination of lost gear. There are a lot of stats floating around. We often use a study that found there were 640,000 metric tons lost every year. There's another study that was done just this year in the Pacific Garbage Patch and discovered that 75% to 80% of the contents were either fishing gear or plastic trapped in fishing gear. The reduction of even a small portion of the gear lost every year by fishermen has a huge impact on ocean climate health.  

The second piece of our impact is that our fishermen spend less time driving around looking for their gear. That translates to direct fuel savings and direct reduction in carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. 

We've built a product which is capable of being dragged down with fishing gear to 200 meters or more. It's capable of surviving out in the Bering Sea for months at a time and is capable of communicating through a variety of channels. Our cloud technology allows the data gathered from the buoy to be transmitted to a variety of sources, anywhere from the fisherman's spouse’s cell phone to the fleet manager’s computer. 
 
SeaAhead: You stated earlier that the products can also be used by aquaculture. Can you elaborate? 
 
Macy: In a lot of the smaller, more emerging aquaculture fields, they’re setting farms in remote locations. These are not giant pens of salmon that are loaded with sensors and regular visits from boats as they're feeding the fish. These are arrays of gear that are set up in a challenging location, let's say a plane ride and or boat ride away from where the actual farm owners are, and they need to make sure that their farm is staying together. If there is a storm that comes through and breaks up some of the lines in a farm or drags a portion of it underwater, farmers need that information. We help them monitor the location and condition of their lines and are also able to provide them with some basic information about what's going on with things like current and temperature. 
 
SeaAhead: What kind of challenges has Blue Ocean Gear faced? How did you overcome these issues and what insight did it give you for future business operations? 
 
Macy: I think the biggest challenge has been that the fishing industry is very traditional. It's small, it's fragmented. The fishing industry gets a lot of pressure from a lot of outside groups to change the way they do things. Building a technology that really started for and was built around fishermen — as opposed to being built around the objectives of other stakeholders — was important and took time. We did a lot of testing with fishermen to figure out how to create something that would add value to the way they operate.  
 
SeaAhead: What do you hope to get out of the Gulf Blue Navigator Program? 
 
Macy: Our goals in signing up for the program were threefold. The first was that we were hoping to take advantage of the facilities associated with the Marine Research Center and everything from the production or prototyping facilities to access to vessels for testing in relatively calm water. Also, access to the Cube Net arrays and testing ranges.  

The second one was plugging into the broader ecosystem around the blue economy in the Gulf Coast. Meeting other stakeholders, everyone from the NOAA Data Buoy Center to some of large government contractors.  

And then the third was getting to know the local fishing and aquaculture communities on the Gulf Coast. We have developed good connections in the Northeast and in the Northwest but hadn't done much business in the Gulf of Mexico. It was an opportunity to meet a new set of customers. 
 
SeaAhead: What experience with the Gulf Blue Navigator program has made the biggest impression so far? 
 
Macy: From our perspective, probably the ability to get out on the water. We had the chance to go out one morning and meet with an oyster farmer who was trialing some of our gear. It was a great, hands-on experience that’s sometimes hard to get. 

For our second session, my teammates were out actively testing with one of the Marine Research Center boats. It was really invaluable for us to be able to do that.  

I think that's what is missing in our local community here in California- having access to the resources we need to be able to regularly interact with customers on their home turf and test in an ocean environment. For most of our history we’ve had to find individual fishermen that were willing to take us out in between their regular jobs. 
 
SeaAhead: Where do you see Blue Ocean Gear in 10 years?  
 
Macy: We're trying to build the largest network of ocean sensors in the world. And we're building this network by using existing deployed equipment rather than putting out a new array of floating plastic buoys to add to the pollution problem. We're doing it in a cost-effective way. And we're doing it in areas that we think are where the most important data is coming from, which is the coastal regions where most of the economic activity is.