July 18, 2018 — The seafood fortune tellers got a lot of things right about the 2018 Atlantic sea scallop season, including a dramatic decline in prices for the largest sizes.
From April 1 through June 30, the first three months of the season, buyers paid an average of $10.13 for U-10 scallops at the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), the seafood auction house in New Bedford, Massachusetts, BASE reports. That’s a 29% decline from the $14.37 paid for such scallops during the first three months of the 2017 season.
U-12s, meanwhile, went for $9.16 during the most recent three-month period, 37% less than the $14.58 paid during the same period in 2017, according to BASE.
Data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicate that just 516,840 (7%) of the roughly 7.6 million pounds sold at the auction between April 1 and June 30 were U-10s — the size designation for the largest scallops, meaning it would take 10 to fill a standard-size bucket. During the most recent period studied — the first 11 days of July — an average of $9.71/lb was paid for the 89,864 lbs of U-10s sold on the auction floor, all from the region known as Closed Area 1, according to the NOAA data.