Tag Archives: Nantucket
Nantucket’s Commercial Scalloping Harvest Tops 8,000 Bushels
Nantucket’s commercial scalloping season comes to an end today, and the harvest by island fishermen will top 8,000 bushels for the first time since the 2019-20 season. Scallopers, along with officials from the Nantucket Shellfish Association and the town’s Natural Resources Department, all said they were pleased to see the final number above 8,000 bushels, a small but not insignificant increase over last season’s total of 7,329 bushels. Bruce Cowan was among the few scallopers still fishing on Thursday, and he returned to Old South Wharf with his five-bushel limit and a smile on his face just before noon. Even with heavy rain and wind gusts expected to top 40 mph today, he said he was still thinking about getting out there for the final day of the season. Photos, more, >>click to read<< 07:45
Nantucket’s Commercial Scalloping Season Opens With “Cautious Optimism”
Nantucket’s 2023-24 commercial scalloping season began Wednesday under cloudy skies, along with some wind and rain, as the hunt for the island’s prized shellfish was renewed. About 15 scallop boats were out in Nantucket Harbor, along with another five in Madaket Harbor Island fish markets set the wholesale price paid to scallopers at $15 to $18 per pound, down from the start of last season, and the retail prices ranged from $20 to $25 per pound. But all of that – the number of boats out fishing, the prices, and the demand – will be fleshed out and subject to change as the first week of fishing rolls along, said Samantha Denette, executive director of the Nantucket Shellfish Association. “It’s always cautious optimism and trying to be optimistic,” Denette said. “We’re not looking at a banner year but we’re not looking at a dud either. I feel good about us being in the middle. But we can’t make the call on day one if it’s going to be either/or.” >>click to read<< 08:55
Nantucket Scallop Harvest Nearly Doubles Over Last Season
Late Thursday morning, scalloper Keith Day was unloading his catch at the Nantucket Boat Basin, one of the few fishermen still dropping dredges at the end of the season. His assessment? “It’s been the best year I’ve had in 10 years,” Day said. “Even with the price where it is now, if you still fish and you still grind out on it, it equals out or you can make more than you made last year. There was just not enough last year. It’s been a pretty good season. I’m still getting my limit on the second to last day. Overall, it’s been a good season for me.” >click to read< 09:36
Why Are Island Scallopers Struggling To Sell Their Catch On Nantucket?
It’s the peak of Nantucket’s commercial scalloping season, but one of the island’s long-running scallopers, Bob DeCosta, isn’t on the water. And he’s not the only local fisherman whose dredges are dry these days. “I’m not fishing because I have no place to sell them,” DeCosta said. “This is a new thing. It’s unfortunate because there’s still plenty of scallops out there to be caught.” Despite what fishermen have described as one of the best seasons in recent memory, DeCosta and some other island scallopers are struggling to sell their catch on Nantucket. There were already limited options on the island, and with the recent closure of Glidden’s Seafood for several months, a number of fishermen in the island’s fleet have been unable to find buyers for their scallops. >click to read< 09:53
A Turn of Events! Massive scallop bed discovered in Madaket
A huge bed of scallop seed, discovered off Madaket last week, offered a bit of optimism about the future of the island’s bay scallop fishery, after a less than optimistic opening week. “It is an area in Madaket Harbor that is equal to about 35 football fields and full of seed,” said Tara Riley, the town’s shellfish biologist. “I’ve never in my professional life here on Nantucket seen anything like it, how thick the seed is.” >click to read< 14:55
Slim pickings for Nantucket scallopers on opening day
Optimism was in short supply as commercial scalloping season opened this morning, but the dock price, the price paid to fishermen for a pound of shucked scallops, was almost double what it was on opening day last year: $22 per pound, compared to $12 in 2020. At Sayle’s Seafood, scallops were selling retail for $35 per pound this afternoon. Souza’s Seafood had yet to set a price. Bob DeCosta, who has been working the waters here for decades, “I just think there aren’t a lot of scallops. It’s not like last year. But we’ll see. The fleet is small and the price is good. >click to read< 17: 11
Massachusetts Lobstermen fear end of their livelihood
Dan Pronk is worried a new set of proposed NOAA and NMFS restrictions aimed at saving the North Atlantic right whale could be the nail in the coffin for the lobstering industry on Nantucket. “We’ve got five years left of lobstering down here,” said Pronk, the only commercial lobsterman on Nantucket, and one of only a handful of lobstermen around the region with traps south of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s career ending if they get their way. We’re bending over backwards to appease these people. >click to read< 13:28
A Q&A With Nantucket Scalloper Carl Sjolund
Carl Sjolund has had his feet on the deck of a boat, fishing island waters for scallops, since he was a little boy. He has seen the shellfish fishery rise and fall. To say that fishing is in his blood is not to turn a phrase, but to state a simple fact. His father Rolf came to the island as a young man, from Norway, fresh out of the merchant marine, and fished Georges Bank. His son Jim scalloped with his dad since he was a kid, graduated from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and is now captain of the 184-foot Northern Leader, fishing for cod off Alaska. Nantucket is also in his blood. When did you begin scalloping? I got my first scallop license at 12 years old. Charlie Sayle and I had a merger. He had an old boat, and I had an outboard motor, or I forget maybe it was the other way around.,, >click to read< 16:00
Scallops open at $16-$22 a pound
Nantucket’s commercial scalloping season opened Monday morning with a fleet of about 16 fishermen heading into Nantucket and Madaket harbors at low tide with gusty winds of 25-30 mph. The scallopers were bringing their catch to island fish markets by 2 p.m., which were charging customers $16-22 per pound for shucked scallop meat, compared to $25-26 on opening day last year. Ninety-six island fishermen took out commercial scalloping licenses this year, according to town natural resources coordinator Joanne Dodd. There were 108 commercial licenses issued last year, and 79 the year before. >click to read< 11:13
Are scalloping’s days numbered on Nantucket?
Nantucket bay scalloping is a dying profession, town shellfish constable J.C. Johnson said this week, just days after commercial scalloping season came to a close. Fishermen brought in 13,000 bushels of scallops last season. That number was down by 10,000 bushels this year to around 3,000, making the season’s harvest one of the lowest ever, Johnson said. Along with the decreased harvest size, the fleet itself is aging, with only a handful of young scallopers now fishing. “We have a couple younger guys going out, but your veteran guys, Bill Spencer, Herkey Stojak, all those guys who have been scalloping for years are almost done, so what’s going to happen if you don’t have their kids following suit?” he asked. “Guys that scallop to the end are your veterans, your die-hards, guys who are out there. That’s their business,” he said. >click to read<15:49
Law protecting seals needs to change as population grows
John Dowd is correct that we have a “booming seal population,” but he’s wrong on two other counts (“Still swimming with sharks,” Metro, Sept. 13). First, he says that Nantucket has no seal or shark problem. On the contrary, one of the Northeast’s most celebrated fishing destinations, Nantucket’s Great Point, is now effectively a seal refuge, and the small island of Muskeget, just to the west of Nantucket, has been called one of the largest gray seal breeding sites in the country. More important, the first step to managing an ever-expanding seal population, and the white sharks it attracts, is not, as Dowd does, to call for a seal cull, which is a political nonstarter, but rather to pass an amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act,,, and a short rebuttal. >click to read<16:33
Vote against fishing restrictions seen as win for RI, Galilee
At its meeting Tuesday, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council voted 16-4 to discontinue a proposed squid buffer zone framework off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, according to Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd “There were a good number of commercial fishermen, squid fishermen present. There were also a good number of people from Nantucket present. Basically everybody that wanted to speak got a chance to speak, and the council did the right thing,” she said. All members of the Narragansett Town Council had signed a letter Dec. 4 requesting the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council “reject further discussion of a buffer zone for the summer squid fishery off Nantucket.” click here to read the story 15:46
How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World
Today Nantucket Island is a fashionable summer resort: a place of T-shirt shops and trendy boutiques. It’s also a place of picture-perfect beaches where even at the height of summer you can stake out a wide swath of sand to call your own. Part of what makes the island unique is its place on the map. More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “away off shore.” But what makes Nantucket truly different is its past. For a relatively brief period during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this lonely crescent of sand at the edge of the Atlantic was the whaling capital of the world and one of the wealthiest communities in America. click here to read the story 14:46
State unreceptive to squid-fishing petition
David Pierce, director of the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries, started yesterday’s public hearing on whether to bar trawlers from fishing for squid within three miles of Nantucket by listing the reasons he does not support a local petition to keep them away from the island from May 1 to Oct. 31. By the end of the four-hour meeting, attended by an overflow crowd at the Public Safety Facility, Nantucket charter captain and former commercial fisherman Pete Kaizer hoped Pierce had changed his mind on at least one thing: that trawlers disrupt what are called squid mops in a way that kills squid eggs and affects spawning. subscription site, more info to follow as it becomes available. 09:46
Nantucket: Concerns Over Small Mesh Trawling for Squid Surface at DMF Hearing
New regulations for squid, conch and striped bass fisheries were among the topics of a wide-ranging public hearing Wednesday at the Katharine Cornell Theatre. About 20 people, including commercial fishermen from on and off the Island, provided comments on eight draft and emergency regulations proposed by the Division of Marine Fisheries. Read the rest here 13:16
Nantucket Fisherman Finds a Digital Lifeline for His Fading Livelihood – Video
For many years now, Willis Blount, the last offshore commercial fisherman still operating around Nantucket, once the center of the country’s whaling industry, has been having a tough time making ends meet. Facing insurmountable odd’s He turned to Kickstarter. <Read more here> 17:10
