The Southeast Fisheries Science Center Mississippi Laboratories conducts standardized fisheries independent resource surveys in the Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, and U.S. Caribbean to provide abundance and distribution information to support regional and international stock assessments. The congressional supplemental sampling program (CSSP) was started in 2011 with the intent to provide additional information on key fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), create a truly synoptic survey, increase precision of relative abundance estimates, and to evaluate selectivity issues between gears and hook sizes. The survey was conducted on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico from Brownsville, Texas to the southwest coast of Florida from April 7 – October 25, 2011. Contract vessels provided captains and deck-crew, while the Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC) provided scientific crew. Two longline and one vertical line vessel sampled east GOM sites while two longline and one vertical line vessel simultaneously sampled west GOM sites. Vessels were deployed as close in time as possible to ensure temporal overlap and to provide as synoptic a GOM-wide data set as possible. Randomly selected stations are restricted from being chosen within the boundaries of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (Stetson Bank, West Flower Garden Bank and East Flower Garden Bank), the Madison-Swanson and Steamboat Lumps marine protected areas, the Florida Middle Grounds, within 1 nautical mile (nm) of oil and gas platform structures, and within 1 nm of any other station in the stratum. All gear deployments were monitored using a shipboard SCS/FSCS computer system operated with weatherproof laptop computers with touch screen options. SCS/FSCS software will allow the acquisition of data to describe set and haul-back events (GMT time/date stamp, position and any other connected ship sensors). Environmental data was collected using a Seabird CTD profiler during fishing gear soaks to obtain temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen profiles. Set and catch data were ingested into an Oracle data set and stored as a relational data set.