CASCO BAY, Maine — An orange sun exploded behind a tangle of blue clouds on Monday morning, silhouetting the stone beacon tower on Little Mark Island that once held supplies for shipwrecked sailors.
Lying roughly between Eagle and Bailey islands, the 197-year-old navigational aid is one of the final outposts guiding fishermen at the far reaches of Casco Bay.
But Kenny Blanchard and Josh Todd didn’t have time to admire the gorgeous sunrise, or contemplate the history of the 50-foot tower.
They were busy, on their hands and knees, picking scallops from a pile of seaweed and rocks on the heaving stern of a Chebeague Island fishing boat. A constant breeze made the 26-degree air feel even colder, and the rising winter sun radiated no extra warmth.
“This really isn’t too bad,” said 37-year-old Blanchard, steam following his voice into the air. “Sometimes it’s cold enough to get the deck all iced up — and it snows, too.”
Though often romanticized for tourists and marketing, there’s little glamor in the work of a Maine fisherman — especially in the dead of winter, when the state’s scalloping season takes place.
Worth about $9 million to Maine’s economy every year, it can be an important financial bridge for fishermen waiting out the slowest part of the lobstering season. Their fresh catch, known as “day boat scallops,” are prized and often sold directly to hungry locals. Those buyers are smart, knowing that scallops purchased at other times of the year have likely been soaked in preserving chemicals, which dilute the taste.
The scallops picked by Blanchard and Todd on Monday were already spoken for by Mainers in the know, going for $18 a pound. By comparison, fish markets may pay fishermen a lower rate — roughly $13 per pound — while retailing dayboat scallops for $25 or more per pound.
Thus, direct-to-consumer day boat scallops are a good deal for both the public and the fishermen.
But before any fresh Maine scallop gets pan-seared, wrapped in bacon or tossed in linguini, it first has to be wrestled out of the ocean by chilled, wet fishermen like Blanchard and Todd.
Their day began in the 5:30 a.m. darkness, when Josh Todd and his father, Alex Todd, steamed the F/V Jacob & Joshua from Chebeague Island to Littlejohn Island, where they picked up Blanchard.
As Alex Todd piloted his boat to the day’s fishing ground west of Eagle Island, Josh Todd and Blanchard readied the vessel’s eight-foot, 1,500-pound dredge where it hung from scaffolding at the stern. Once in position, Blanchard lowered the dredge on a quarter-inch steel cable.
The Jacob & Joshua shuddered, and the rigging groaned, as the dredge bit into the graveled sea floor, roughly 80 feet below. Alex Todd then piloted his 42-foot boat in a series of concentric circles and intricate zig-zags, towing the dredge along the bottom.
A scallop dredge is essentially a large, empty pocket made of four-inch steel rings. The metal loops are large enough to let ocean mud and baby scallops pass through while scooping up larger ones.
After 15 minutes, Alex Todd gave the order to raise the dredge, which can weigh as much as 3,000 pounds when full of rocks, seaweed and scallops. Back at the surface, a series of hydraulic cables emptied its contents onto a steel tray at the vessel’s open stern called the “litter box.”
After the dredge was lowered back to the bottom, Blanchard and Josh Todd got to work picking scallops out of the jumbled, sodden mess, tossing the valuable catch into orange baskets. They work fast, the legs of their oilskin overalls held tight around their booted ankles with heavy elastic bands to keep out the wind and water. When finished, they scrambled out of the litter box as another cable tipped one end up, sliding everything that wasn’t a scallop overboard.
“A lot of boats don’t have these,” Blanchard said, “and you have to shovel all that stuff back into the water.”
While the dredge did its job below, Blanchard and Josh Todd shucked scallops, employing just three quick knife-flicks for each. The first move separated the shells, the second scooped out the inedible guts and the final snick removed the tasty meat — or the abductor muscle normally holding the two shell halves together.
On the third tow of the day, the crew brought up a monster bivalve.
“That’s got to be the biggest one I have ever seen,” Josh Todd said.
Weighing in at a third of a pound, the giant scallop looked like it could be a meal by itself.
Besides scallops, Blanchard said the dredge often brings up other things, including old bottles, which he collects and displays. On Monday, he found two more.
“I’ve got about 100 of these things at my girlfriend’s house,” he said.
Alex Todd, 54, a lobsterman since before he could legally drive, has fished for scallops since 1990. He said he’s dredged up all sorts of things in his time, including old artillery shell casings.
“One time we found a rubber boot with a sock in it,” he said. “And in the sock were a bunch of little foot bones.”
He said the U.S. Coast Guard came and picked it up, but he never heard anything more about it.
Maine’s 2023-2024 scallop season runs 60 days, from Dec. 11 until March 21. The 10-or-so boats fishing Casco Bay this year are allowed to drag Monday through Thursday and are limited to 135 pounds, or roughly three five-gallon buckets worth, of shucked scallops per day.
The regulations differ slightly depending on where you are on Maine’s coast. Plus, some areas are closed to fishing, while other stretches of ocean are only open on certain days.
“You’ve pretty much got to be a lawyer to keep up with it all,” Alex Todd said.
Maine’s scallop fishery has been regulated since the early 1980s, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration counts the bivalves as abundant and not currently overfished.
Alex Todd and his crew filled their quota in less than half a day, delivering their nearly $2,500 catch to the dock before noon.
Not surprised, Hattie Train, a fishing and science consultant at Portland’s Wharfside Associates, said Alex Todd is known as one of the “fishiest” captains on Casco Bay.
“’Fishy’ being the colloquial term we use for someone that is better at finding and harvesting fish — not like gross ‘fishy,’” Train said, clarifying for landlubbers.
Train said not all lobstermen, such as Alex Todd, also go scalloping, but it’s not uncommon for fishermen to go after more than one species out of economic necessity.
“To have a sustainable source of income in the Gulf of Maine at this point, you need to look at diversifying beyond just one fishery,” she said, “whether that means lobstering and scalloping, or ground fishing and scalloping, or lobster fishing and kelp.”
According to the most recent numbers released by Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, the state’s 2022 scallop landings were worth $8.7 million. That’s roughly equivalent to the value of Maine’s annual oyster harvest — the difference being most oysters are farmed while almost all scallops are caught in the wild.
Both fisheries, like all others, were dwarfed by Maine’s $390 million lobster industry.
In April, Alex Todd and his crew will rent a house in Gloucester, Massachusetts and spend a month fishing offshore during the roughly month-long federal scallop season.
Then, they’ll get back to lobstering.
In the meantime, the trio will be on Casco Bay’s icy waters, four mornings a week, dredging up day boat scallops for discerning Mainers, and ignoring the sunrises.
