January 25, 2017 — It’s scallop season in Maine. Fishermen here have hauled in over 450,000 pounds of the tender delicacy in each of the last three years, but the state produces only a tiny fraction of the entire U.S. sea scallop harvest. So to grow a market for its own brand of inshore scallops, the Maine industry is trying to sell one particular quality that sets it apart.
Just offshore from the Cousins Island town dock in Casco Bay, Alex Todd and his crew, Levi Gloden and Edward Lefebvre, are shelling scallops on Todd’s boat, the Jacob and Joshua.
“We get rid of the stomach and the mantle and all that. And just put the abductor muscle in the bucket,” Todd says.
He is one of more than 600 licensed scallop fishermen in Maine, of which about 450 are active. He has been harvesting scallops for almost 30 years, and chairs the Scallop Advisory Council, a panel that makes recommendations about the fishery.
In Maine, a few dozen fishermen dive underwater in scuba gear to harvest scallops by hand, but the majority of scallops in the state are harvested by draggers, like Todd.
“We tow the dredge — we call it drag, the federal government calls it a scallop dredge — across the bottom. There’s chains on it that tickle the top and the bottom and flip the scallops into the link bag, which we tow a couple hundred yards behind the boat depending on the depth of the water. And after say, 15 minutes, we haul it back, see how many scallops are in it. Dump it out, start over,” he says.
On a good day, like today, Todd hits his quota of 135 pounds of meat, or 3 buckets.
“And yesterday we got ‘em a little quicker. But it’s still early. It’s still good — we’re happy,” he says.