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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 5
January 2008
Islands producing bay scallops; Cape is dry
EDGARTOWN, MA – New England’s bay scallops are coming from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and there are plenty of them.
Dave Fronzuto, marine superintendent for Nantucket, said island fishermen were having their best season in three years. As many as 58 boats were out on opening day, Nov. 1, and most of them were still going strong in early December. Many had two fishermen aboard, each getting their five-bushel-per-person limit.
“They are still getting their limits and are in by midmorning,” Fronzuto said.
However, the price fishermen are getting has raised ire. At the start of the season, Nantucket fishermen got as high as $11 for shucked meats, but that came down quickly to $9 a pound where it stayed.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the price bottomed out at $12 after being as high as $18. Nantucket shellfish fishermen were upset when they learned about the disparity in prices between the two islands and even held meetings to discuss ways to up the Nantucket price.
Adding to the tension was the price consumers were willing to pay for bay scallops on Cape Cod. At the Nauset Fish & Lobster Pool in the Cape town of Orleans, the retail price went as high as $29.99 a pound.
Fronzuto said Nantucket fishermen talked amongst themselves about stopping fishing on Fridays, with the thought that it might bring the price up.
“It didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
Louis Larsen, who runs the Net Result Fish Market in Tisbury on the Vineyard, said the price being paid to the fishermen – $12 – was pretty much dictated by Nantucket markets this year. Last year, Tisbury had the biggest landings of scallops and, with the scarcity, fishermen got paid better.
Tough on the Cape
There weren’t any bay scallops on the Cape, so it was almost exclusively an islands’ product this winter. Anyone going into a Chatham fish market found it was selling Nantucket bay scallops.
“We’ve got zilch,” said Dawson Farber, shellfish constable for Orleans. “We’ve seen a few seed but there is nothing indicative of a season next year.”
In the South Coast town of Westport, one family permit holder got a bushel and a half, according to Shellfish Constable Gary Sherman, and that was it for the season.
Mike Hickey, chief shellfish biologist for the state Division of Marine Fisheries, said he was not aware of any commercial harvesting of bay scallops anywhere on the Cape other than on the two islands.
“If we had the answer why, we’d be doing something,” he said.
Hickey recalled that more than 20 years ago, Cape and islands bay scallopers landed as much as 90,000 bushels in a year.
“For me, if you look where the scallops were once found and where they are being found now, you see the largest part being a change in water quality,” he said. “When there is urbanization of our coastal areas, the scallop resource disappears.”
A good year on Nantucket sees 32,000 bushels landed. The last two years were soft, according to Fronzuto, who said last year fishermen got 3,800 bushels and, the year before, 5,600 bushels. But a lot of Cape towns would be happy to match a bad year on Nantucket.
Vineyard
Martha’s Vineyard was doing well, though it was hard to tell which of the island’s towns would come out on top.
On one sunny December day, Edgartown Shellfish Constable Paul Bagnall said there were 10 boats out fishing for their three, 10-gallon-bucket daily limit. Fishermen had been able to catch their limits within a morning and it was looking like landings might total a couple thousand bushels.
Last year, Tisbury shellfish fishermen had a great season, landing over 6,200 bushels. This year, the number was way down, but there were 10 boats out on Lagoon Pond in early December. The town’s limit is three level bushels.
Tribe project
Aquinnah’s commercial season, which started on Nov. 29, was the last to open in the state and expectations were high.
The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) is in the third year of a $240,500 scallop restoration research project funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The goal is to come up with a prescription for re-establishing bay scallops for small coastal communities. One of the benefits of the research is that Menemsha Pond is loaded with harvestable bay scallops after years of poor sets.
Bret Stearns, natural resource director for the tribe, said the results of the study will be available at the end of the new year. So far, he explained, study participants have identified four key elements involved in re-establishing or nurturing the wild fishery:
• Protecting the habitat, which requires restoring healthy eelgrass beds;
• Restocking the pond with juvenile bay scallops;
• Having an aggressive predator-control program to deal with non-native predators such as the green crab, which can easily devastate shellfish beds; and
• Assuring that shellfish have proper tidal movement and the right kind of food.
Mark Alan Lovewell
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