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.”
Mr. Tehan pulled a scallop dredge out of the bay that he was fairly sure would contain few scallops.Credit…Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times
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.
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