Scallopers enjoy bountiful season
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Marina Finch, capping her fourth season of commercial scalloping, came in early Monday, the official end of the 2007/2008 commercial scallop season. With a south-southeast wind blowing at 22 miles per hour, and temperatures around 37 degrees, it made for a chilly day of fishing with only two bushels to show for it.

Karen Nelthrop flips a scallop meat into a pail while shucking her last two boxes of the season in an Old North Wharf shanty. ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

But March 31 was not a true measure of Finch's last five months dredging the harbor for bay scallops. And there were others still fishing Monday, who, like Finch, had ground it out through the entire season and whose last day was similar to most days she fished this year.

"People got their limits [Monday]," she said. "Smitty did; I know Pennel Ames did and Neil Cocker got his limit out in Madaket, it was just an incredible year, really."

Since the season began on Nov. 1, scallopers hauled in 16,800 bushels of scallops, with half that number taken by Nov. 29, according to Shellfish Biologist Jeff Mercer. The catch is more than four times the dismal 3,850 bushels harvested last season, and worth an estimated $1.5 million based on an average boat price of $12. (Yesterday's wholesale price closed at $14 a pound.)

In early November, Marine Superintendent Dave Fronzuto predicated commercial scallopers would bring in 10,000 to 15,000 bushels. Speaking last Friday about a season that exceeded everybody's expectations on several fronts, Fronzuto said that those who were serious about fishing, the true commercial fishermen on the island, were not disappointed.

"For those who fished, it was very lucrative," he said. "The price held through the season despite the different tweakings by the buyers, but the fishermen who stayed the course for five months, those who stayed out there, did well."

Local and mainland buyers, wary of the last two seasons' poor harvests of 3,850 and 5,500 bushels, opened the wholesale price on Nov. 1 at $11 a pound, despite news of recreational scallopers getting limits quickly wherever they pushraked. The price dropped to $9 per pound on Nov. 9 due to a glut of bay scallops on the market from Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and several towns on Cape Cod.

During the season, scallopers lost roughly 10 days to inclement weather. The harbor never froze over, an obstacle that in recent years closed the fishery for up to four weeks in January and February.

"I guess normally what happens when the harbor freezes is the fishing after the thaw is better," said Fronzuto. "I think with the weather being bad [on those 10 days], we were able to mimic that." Finch added that good supplies of scallops attracted fishermen on even the nastiest days.

"It was a wonderful season and one of the wonderful things about it is we didn't miss many days," she said. "There was no freeze, we didn't have a long period of low temperature. This year, even if the day was marginal, you knew you had to go because you could get your limit."

The same applied to fishing out in Madaket, which was, according to Cocker who fished out there before moving into town, fairly decent.

"I think we got most of them in town. I went to Madaket the last day and did okay," said Cocker, who does not think next season will be as productive based on the lack of seed he's seen in the harbors. "I fished Madaket a lot in the beginning. There were only a few guys out there; it wasn't loaded up, but we did okay."

Though Cocker's guessestimate for next season may sound grim, Finch, Fronzuto and Mercer are more optimistic. Last spring, Mercer purchased one million scallop seed spawned from Nantucket scallops, grew them out in floating upwellers in the harbor and released the 850,000 that survived into Second Bend, which Fronzuto designated off limits to all fishermen. The hope is that these scallops will aid wild populations in spawning more scallops. This seed sanctuary will be fair game next season, as the scallops will have spawned once in early summer and once in the fall.

This spring, Mercer will be getting 1.5 to 2.5 million more seed, spawned from Nantucket scallops from the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and Aquaculture Center in Milford, Conn. Another part of the harbor will be found for their release once they have grown out.

They will join natural seed in parts of the harbor such as the Middle Ground, Hussey Shoal and off Second Point, where Finch and other scallopers have seen it, convincing Fronzuto of the unpredictability of Nantucket's bay scallop fishery.

"It just proves the old-time philosophies more and more, of it just being cyclical," he said. "I think we've done a good job as far as pollution is concerned. We would like to believe we have some control

over it, but it truly is cyclical." I