$10 million a year from the harvest is used to pay for ongoing scientific research to keep tabs on scallop populations, said John Bullard, a former New Bedford mayor who is the regional administrator for commercial fisheries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The scallopers were like, 'My God, look what we've done.' We don't want to ever get into a position where we were in the past," said Bullard. "They have become tremendous stewards of this resource."
NEW BEDFORD, Mass., (The Boston Globe) December 2, 2013 — Unlike other ports around the country, New Bedford is flush with money from the richest fishery in the nation – sea scallops. With many fishermen idle this time of year, the port is mobbed with clean, well-maintained scallopers – many sporting fresh coats of paint. The crowded New Bedford port is in stark contrast to so many other fishing towns whose fleets have shrunk over the years and rusty beatup boats are more common.
Scallops are now averaging $12 a pound off the boat in New Bedford Harbor, at least double the prices of a decade ago, according to Jeff Bolton, vice president of sales at Atlantic Capes Fisheries, which has offices in Fall River and owns 17 scallop boats. A decade ago, fishermen got around $6 a pound. At one point a few weeks ago the dock prices briefly hit $15 a pound, the highest in local memory.
On a good day, a boat can haul 4,000 pounds or more. Since the typical trip lasts 10 days, it's possible for a boat to earn $500,000 on a single outing, said scallop captain Eric Hansen – or $40,000 for each fisherman.
"It's not unheard of for a crew working a full-time boat to be at six figures" in income, said Hansen. "It goes to the car dealerships, support systems in the city – diesel mechanics, ice plants. It keeps the city alive."
New Bedford's catch has become particularly popular among Europeans who prize the region's wild-caught, oversized scallops, said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney in Washington who works for the Fisheries Survival Fund, a trade association of scallop fishermen. "The big White Castle-burger-patty-sized scallop is unique to our fishery," he said.
The health of North Atlantic scallops beds, ironically, stems from the closure of the once-rich fishing grounds on Georges Bank and other areas in the mid-1990s after years of overfishing led fish populations to nosedive. Even today much of Georges Banks is still closed to cod and other fishing, but in those early years the fishing moratoriums allowed the scallop population to explode.
But the scallopers couldn't convince government regulators to let them drop their nets.
In response, the fishing industry created the Fisheries Survival Fund and teamed up with marine biologists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to prove its hunch. The scientists used submerged video cameras to record footage of the ocean floor, revealing extensive beds of fully grown, undisturbed scallops.
"Regions that were formerly closed had in fact been these great breeding grounds for scallops," said Dan Georgianna, an economist at UMass Dartmouth who specializes in the fishing industry.
By the late 1990s, the scientific data had convinced the National Marine Fisheries Service to open previously closed areas to scallopers.
The scallop fishery is lucrative even though scallop fishermen are at sea for only about 90 days a year, said Deirdre Boelke, who coordinates the scallop plan for NOAA. Moreover, scallopers are worried about a proposed 1,000-pound reduction in their annual catch limits for next year in some fisheries to 12,000 pounds, a decrease regulators said is necessary to allow the prodigious stocks of juvenile scallops to grow even larger. NOAA is also proposing reducing the number of days fisherman can access other zones where there are no catch limits to 23 days from the current 33.
However, scallopers and New Bedford officials are objecting to NOAA's proposal to lower the catch limits for next year, the second straight year lands would decrease under the scallop-bed rotation plan. The New England Fishery Management Council is expected to recommend a new quota next month to the National Marine Fisheries Service, whose officials have final say on the limits.
Boelke, the NOAA scallop coordinator, said the lower catch limit is not driven by overfishing concerns. Rather, the current crop of scallops is too young.
"The scallops are there," Boelke said. "They just aren't ready."
But scallopers fear the small catch will only serve to push prices up to the point where consumers will stop buying, and fishermen will make less money. Hansen, for example, said the catch limit should remain at the current 13,000 pounds, enough to sustain scallopers until new beds of scallops are opened in two years.
Read the full story at The Boston Globe