Shrinking Catch Puts Bay Scallops At A Premium

April 16, 1997|By Mark Bittman, New York Times News Service..

NANTUCKET, Mass. — Near the end of March, the water in Nantucket harbor was more than a little choppy; the tide was running out and the wind was coming in, a combination that produced spray, and plenty of it. Like the sky, the water was unvaryingly gray; like the air, it was bitingly cold.

None of this fazed Joe Peterson as he circled a small patch of the harbor in his 20-foot open boat, towing eight dredges and trying to catch his daily limit: five bushels of bay scallops.

Neither Peterson nor any of the handful of other scallopers was likely to reach the maximum, which works out to 40 or 50 pounds of shucked scallops. In fact, hardly anyone reached the limit since early in the season, which began in November and ended in March.

Even if any of Peterson's competitors were that lucky, the amount of scallops shipped off the island will still be only a few hundred pounds. But that relatively small amount packs a culinary wallop that belies its size.

Chefs and seafood retailers pay whatever it takes to get their hands on these incomparably sweet morsels. It isn't hard to understand why the Argopecten irradians--sometimes called the Cape or Nantucket scallop--is nothing short of a local treasure.

Diminishing returns

Bay scallops once grew wild from Cape Cod to North Carolina, wherever the eelgrass in which they reproduce is plentiful, the temperature moderate and the water shallow. But a shrinking and often polluted habitat now limits commercial scalloping to Peconic Bay off Long Island, the inshore waters of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, the sheltered harbors and bays of a few Cape Cod towns and a few isolated areas in southeastern Massachusetts.

In each of those locations, the catch is diminishing. On Long Island, the culprit is brown tide, a phytoplankton that turns the sea brown, kills eelgrass and "appears to overload the feeding systems of filter feeders like scallops and clams, effectively starving them to death," said Ken Gall. Gall is a seafood specialist at the New York Sea Grant program in Stony Brook, N.Y., the local arm of a federal and state partnership that advises on the uses of coastal resources.

The result: tiny harvests. This year's crop, like last year's, will be about 25,000 pounds, compared with 270,000 pounds in the winter of 1994-95.

Nantucket is in better shape, but will still produce less than 500,000 pounds this winter. Triple that amount was harvested in the peak year of 1968 and, as recently as 1980, the catch was twice what it is now.

"The habitat has declined everywhere," said Ken Kelley, a former marine biologist for Nantucket who now makes a living as a scallop fisherman and a writer on marine issues. In Nantucket's 5-mile-long main harbor, the enemy is fertilizer runoff. Used mostly for recently established lawns, the fertilizer spurs the growth of plants other than eelgrass; it also may contain weedkillers.

Challenging task

Like the cold weather, this discourages Peterson, but it doesn't stop him.

In a good year on a large fishing boat out of a major port, someone like Peterson might gross $60,000, or even more. Earning that amount on Nantucket as a bay scalloper is next to impossible. A good week of bay scalloping might gross a fisherman $1,000 or more. Furthermore, most scallopers pay 20 percent of their gross to "openers," part-timers who spend afternoons shucking the scallops from several fishermen.

The work is tough, but "you're your own boss out there," Peterson says. Clearly, bay scallops are in his blood. He eats them "once or twice" a week during the season, and thinks he probably would even if he had to pay for them.

"You can't mess around with them much," he says, echoing the comments of top New York chefs. "I just cook them in olive oil or butter, with some lemon. "

Late in the season, Peterson was satisfied with three boxes of scallops, which, when shucked, will yield about 30 pounds. He received about $10 a pound for them (less $2 a pound for the opener).

He ships his scallops to a wholesaler 35 miles away in New Bedford, Mass. From there, they are sent to the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan and to other distribution centers, and to chefs and retailers throughout the Northeast and elsewhere.

At each step of the way, the price reflects the effect of small markups (bay scallops are not a high-profit item for anyone) and shipping costs. The retail price varies from one year to the next, and from early in the season to late. In 1994, when the Long Island crop was strong, bay scallops were selling for $12 a pound. This season, they were $15 a pound in November, and rose to $20.

Big demand

Regardless of price, they sell. "They just dribble in," said Bill Bowers, the owner of Jake's Fish Market on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "I'm lucky if I get 25 pounds a week, and they're gone almost as soon as I get them."