With fishermen set to take the water Tuesday for the opening day of the 2011-2012 commercial scalloping season, early signs suggest this year could be better than last, a devastating year in which scallopers hauled in just over 6,916 bushels of the succulent shellfish between Nov. 1, 2010 and the end of March, and a far cry from the 18,116 bushels harvested the previous season.
Nantuckets bay scallop industry has been considered for over two decades to be the last commercially-viable bay scallop fishery in the world, but it is never easy to predict what a season will be like, nor is the word prediction an accurate word to use when trying to determine how a season will go, according to Tara Riley, the towns shellfish biologist.
Im under the opinion that it has to be better than last year, she said. Its tough to say as far as using the word prediction, just because the scallops are not uniformly distributed throughout the harbor, making it difficult to make specific predictions about the season. The scallops are in bands around the harbor, and when you do dive assessments for surveys, it depends on whether you are on the scallops or not.
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