As the 2019 scallop season shifts into high gear in Maine and Massachusetts, fishermen are hoping this year’s haul will be stronger than last.
This season started April 1st. Industry observers are expecting a great harvest following a banner crop last year.
“We are projecting 62.5 million pounds of harvest for 2019 – this is up slightly from 2018,” scallop analyst for New England Fishery Council Jonathon Peros told SeafoodSource. “In terms of total weight landed, the 2019 season should be comparable to the 2018 season.”
For the 2018 season, numbers were 56.8 million pounds of commercial landings, Peros said.
The high catch prediction is thanks to an especially high quota, which the New England Fisheries Management Council recommended due to high densities of scallops located in multiple fishing areas. Camera and trawl surveys of certain regions, such as the Nantucket Lightship, have found a density of more than 10 scallops per square meter when a density of even one scallop per square meter is considered high.
Individually, each state has had banner scallop harvests in recent years. Maine’s scallop fishery has rebounded from a record-low catches in the mid-2000s, but after several years of steady improvement, catch totals regressed last year. Fishermen harvested a little more than 560,000 pounds of scallop meat in 2018, down from more than 800,000 pounds in 2017. The 2017 harvest was the biggest in 20 years.
State fishery managers say scheduled closures likely played a role in the drop last year.
