December 14, 2022 — The East Coast scallop fleet is expected to land around 25 million pounds in the 2023 fishing year – about half of the landings from 2018 through 2020 that exceeded 50 million pounds, according to the New England Fishery Management Council.
Those boom times were driven by exceptionally big 2012-2013 year classes of scallops. Now the 2022 survey results show biomass is at its lowest since 1999. Yet scallops are not overfished and the stock is healthy, although the biomass has been coasting down with lower recruitment since 2013, according to a summary of the council’s Dec. 5-9 meeting at Newport, R.I.
The 2023 scallop fishing year begins on April 1, and the council staff expects most fishing effort will focus around Georges Bank, shifting north from the Mid-Atlantic where recruitment has been below average.