Fishing for Scallops When the Scallops Are Nearly All Dead

Mike Tehan pilots a fishing boat called Nibbles out of Shelter Island. An hour before sunrise on the first day of scallop season in November, as he unwound the ropes, started the outboard motor and piloted the 25-foot fiberglass boat from an island cove into the open waters of Peconic Bay, Mr. Tehan knew just what he’d find.

“I didn’t come out here with big plans to get rich today,” he said. “You can’t say it’s depressing, because you already know. But you hope.”

He bashed north against the waves, toward the protected bay off Orient, at the far northeast corner of Long Island. He dropped four rusty dredges into the water, just as the bay turned pink with sunrise. He let the outboard rumble the boat around for five minutes. Then he pulled the dredges back up and dumped the contents into a sorting tray.

“Let’s see, we got seaweed, rocks, conch shells, lots of dead scallops and one good scallop,” he said, picking through the dreck with bright orange gloves. “So we’re averaging half a scallop per dredge. That’s not going to pay the bills.”

Peconic Bay scallops are as delicate as they are delicious. But at the moment, most of the adult scallops in Peconic Bay are dead. They died in 2019, and nobody knew exactly why. They died again the following year — about 98 percent of all the adult scallops, dead in their pink and green and gray shells along the bottom of the bay — and most of them died every year after.

But for fishermen on Shelter Island, a scallop season without scallops comes as no surprise. A great harvest in 1894 was followed by a bust the following year, when locals blamed their neighbors for overfishing. Hurricanes destroyed the scallop beds in 1938 and 1954. A shortage of eelgrass habitat depressed scallop populations for much of the 1930s; an overabundance of algae nearly killed bay scallops off entirely in 1985 and again in 1995.

The current die-off is no less severe, but it may last longer than any that came before, said Stephen Tettelbach, a shellfish ecologist with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. Scallops can survive the bay’s rising water temperatures caused by warming seas, Mr. Tettelbach said. They can survive the arrival of a new parasite, or they can survive the normal stress of spawning. But most cannot survive all three.

The result: Peconic Bay scallops spawn by the millions, then die before they reach harvestable age and size. Since the latest die-off started, Mr. Tettelbach and his team have periodically dived along the bottom of the bay in scuba gear, searching for adult survivors. These are transported to the extension’s hatchery in Southold, where the scallops are held in tanks until spawning season. Their offspring — hundreds of thousands of little shells — are taken back to the bay, where they supplement the wild population, and where their genetics hopefully will prove more tolerant, said Harrison Tobi, an aquaculture specialist at the extension.

Early results are promising, Mr. Tobi said, but there’s no way to know when these efforts will help the population rebound. It could be years before the boom harvests of the last century return.

In the meantime, diners intent on eating fresh bay scallops may need to travel to Massachusetts. Cooler water around Nantucket and a healthy spring spawn have resulted in a robust population and talk of a “scallop surplus” in 2024.

Shelter Island scallopers already face an even greater threat. The island is in the middle of some of the most valuable real estate in the United States. And as much of this end of Long Island has been colonized by wineries and country estates, the roughly 2,000 middle-class year-round residents on Shelter Island have been able to resist gentrification longer than similar communities in neighboring towns for a simple reason: Unless you have your own boat, the only way on or off Shelter Island is by ferry.

But in the last two decades, land prices have exploded, making it impossible for younger workers like Mr. Tehan to buy property on Shelter Island. Though he grew up on the island and works there now, he and his wife rent a home in Orient. His father lives on his charter fishing boat, which he docks on the island.

“I wasn’t aware that I could have bought property here 20 years ago,” Mr. Tehan, 41, said. “And now I can’t.”

Still, the latest die-off has caused only modest financial hardship: The commercial and recreational fishermen of Shelter Island learned years ago that you can’t depend on scallops. A good season is a nice bonus, but you need to have a day job. By the second brown tide algal bloom, in 1995, most commercial fishermen had diversified, buying new gear to catch black sea bass, blackfish and striped bass, said Ken Homan, owner of Braun’s Seafood, a major wholesaler on the North Fork.

The same day Mr. Tehan was on Peconic Bay, a commercial fisherman named Pete Winters was elsewhere on the water, but he wasn’t bothering with scallops. He was looking for whelk. Considered rubbery and overbearing by many Americans, the sea snails are popular in many Asian dishes. In a few hours, Mr. Winters caught several bushels, which he figured he could sell for $2.30 a pound.

“That’s a couple grand,” he said, estimating the value of the mollusks he’d packed into mesh bags on his pickup bed. “I love going for scallops. But this makes more sense.”

Financially, it makes sense to give up on scallops. But for John Tehan, Mike’s father, the camaraderie and hard work of scallop season is difficult to let go. The work is hard. State law forbids scallopers from using mechanical winches, so every dredge must be pulled from the water hand over hand. Baymen then bring their catch to a licensed shop, where family and friends would drink beer, joke around and pry open scallop shells with wide knives, their blades kept dull to limit the risk of injury.

“You start a fire in the wood stove, and peoples’ wives and girlfriends show up and open scallops with you,” said John Tehan, 65, who makes his living during summer tourist season operating a charter fishing boat. “You’re having fun, and you’re eating scallops all day.”

Flush years brought more than scallop dinners. The Shelter Island Historical Society occupies a white Colonial farmhouse built on the island’s main road in 1743; it was renovated at a cost of $6 million four years ago. In a recent oral history project run by the society, Cecilia Kraus, 96, recounted how scalloping would pay for family vacations and Christmas presents. “Those scallops,” a Shelter Islander in her 80s named Ann Clark told the society, “they paid for our house.”

Shelter Islanders like Bert Waife, a 64-year-old oyster farmer who has lived on the island since the 1980s, could always tell when the baymen had a good scallop season: All of his neighbors suddenly had new pickup trucks.

Since the latest die-off, the elder Tehan hasn’t stuck around for scallop season. By opening day, he’s hundreds of miles away, piloting his charter boat down the East Coast for the Bahamas, where he spends the winter fishing and flirting with the locals.

“I know Mike misses working the scallops together,” he said. “I miss it, too.”

Those who remained on Shelter Island to look for scallops were the hard core, the romantics and the purists, for whom a fallow winter turns the search for scallops into something like a sacramental rite.

At 5:40 a.m. on opening day, Nibbles was the only boat moving. Mr. Tehan kept his right hand on the throttle and steered the boat with the index finger of his left hand on the wheel. He kept the boat to a low-wake crawl till he reached the mouth of Congdon Creek, where he pulled open the gas. In a boom season, before the die-off, Orient Harbor might attract 100 boats. This year, Mr. Tehan had the shallows to himself.

“I wonder where everyone is today,” he said. “I’ve never seen it like this before.”

He tossed his dredges twice. He got dead shells, live eelgrass and a great shoulder workout. From Orient he traced a route that echoed the original Via Dolorosa, bearing east, south, then east again. He hit West Neck Harbor and a spot known to locals as Split Rock. He took a dozen adult live scallops, each of legal size, but together too few even to call lunch.

“Next I’ll hit a secret spot,” Mr. Tehan said. “My Hail Mary.”

On the way, Mr. Tehan shared the story of his first day scalloping. It was the day before Christmas Eve, 1990. He would have been 8. He went out with his grandfather, who worked in book publishing, and his father, a bartender turned charter boat captain. The Tehan men were five minutes from the dock when they killed the engine. The air filled with snow, which melted when it hit the water.

Their first dredge came up filled with scallops, a perfect meal for three. They sailed home, his father happy with the weather and the catch.

“It was snowy and cold, and I was miserable,” Mr. Tehan said. “I assume I had fun.”

Opening day this season was all about cost. Each of the four dredges cost $500. It took $150 to gas up Nibbles. Mr. Tehan works three jobs, one as a captain on the North Ferry to Shelter Island, another as a building contractor and a third helping his wife run Flowers’ Edge, a florist in Cutchogue. Opening day cost him two days’ pay — one to prepare the boat, the other to work the water.

Mr. Tehan’s grandfather died years ago. His father was headed for the Caribbean. His friends won’t work for free. For company, he was forced to spend opening day with a journalist and a photographer who had never pulled a dredge, and were lousy at steering a boat.

The Hail Mary spot came up empty, as he feared. There would be no feast tonight.

“It’s a bummer,” he said. “But I’ve gotten used to the fact that I’ll probably be disappointed opening day.”

As the season progressed, Mr. Tehan would take Nibbles out three more times. He managed to catch 80 pounds of scallops. Ten pounds went into his freezer; the rest he sold for $25 a pound. In Moriches Bay, off Fire Island, commercial fishermen have caught scallops in healthy numbers this winter. Mr. Tobi and his team have added some scallops caught there to their hatchery, in hopes that they’ll prove hardy enough to revive populations in Peconic Bay.

Whether the season is bountiful or not, its ceremonies will not be rushed. A few minutes after 10 a.m. on opening day, the waves on Peconic Bay settled in the dying wind. Mr. Tehan, sweaty from two hours of pulling dredges, took a scallop shell in the rubberized glove of his left hand. With his right, he used a knife to crack the hinge and then gave it a twist, pulling the muscle from the mantle and flicking the viscera into the water. He repeated these steps twice more. On the sorting tray he laid out three scallops in their shells, a quarter of the day’s catch. Next he produced a little plastic bottle of Jezynowka Polish blackberry-flavored brandy, 70 proof.

“Do you like sushi?” Mr. Tehan asked.

The scallops went down cold, still dripping with bay water, a flash of buttery meat with a light taste of salt. Next, each person took a swig of brandy, fruitier and more delicious than its brown plastic bottle would suggest.

“That’ll do it,” Mr. Tehan said.

Nearly all the scallops in Peconic Bay are dead. Scalloping isn’t quite.