![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/deckhands-maine-scallops.jpg\")
<\/a>Two deckhands bring in a dredge full of Maine scallops. The small ones are tossed overboard while the large ones are placed in bins to be shucked. Photo by Sujata Gupta<\/p><\/div>\n
The scene will no doubt replay tomorrow and the day after that and so on until the season is done. Today is December 1, and scalloping season has opened in eastern Maine.<\/p>\n
\n
The first time I tried a Maine scallop was while visiting my in-law\u2019s house in a rural coastal town. The scallops were the size of apricots and seared lightly in brown butter. Sweet and tender, they were sublime, and bore little resemblance to the chewy, slightly fishy scallops at my local supermarket. Where had these been all my life? And where was their champion?<\/p>\n
I soon found Brawn, a 46-year-old, fast-talking, foul-mouthed, self-professed Maine scallop evangelist. Brawn runs Downeast Dayboat, a company she started in 2011 with the pledge to get Maine scallops en route to their buyer, whether an individual client or restaurant owner, within 24 hours of being plucked off the ocean floor. To get the timing right, Brawn drives up and down the coast of Maine all winter to meet the fishermen at the docks. She then packs the freshly harvested catch into her giant, white Ford E350 refrigerated van and drives to the closest delivery point. Brawn, who almost always travels with a fisherman on opening day, invited me along.<\/p>\n
Brawn\u2019s foray into all things Maine scallop began years earlier, in 2007, when she became one of two marine resource management coordinators at the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). There was one person overseeing lobsters and one overseeing everything else, Brawn says. \u201cI was the everything else.\u201d Early on, Brawn\u2019s boss acknowledged that the job was too big for one person. At least, he added, the abundance of options would give Brawn the freedom to choose her own focus. Soon enough, she chose scallops.<\/p>\n
The Maine guys are bit players in a big ocean, Brawn says. In 2012, the last year for which data is available, dockside revenues for the entire scallop fishery in the US Northeast\u2014which extends from Maine to Virginia\u2014equalled US $559-million, ranking it among the most valuable single-species fisheries in the country. Of that scallop pie, states only have jurisdiction over the first three nautical miles (5.6 kilometers) from shore; the federal government\u2019s reach extends from the state boundaries to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from shore. That means scallops caught in Maine waters comprise about one percent of the total northeastern catch, a veritable drop in the bucket.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Togue Brawn\u2019s company, Downeast Dayboat, distributes fresh scallops to restaurateurs and individual aficionados. She meets fishermen right at the dock, quickly packages the scallops, and ships the product within 24 hours of being caught. Photo by Portland Press Herald\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n
Scallopers fishing in federal waters go out for about a week, give or take a few days, throwing the scallops on ice, where they soak up water. In 2012, the Boston Globe <\/em>reported that scallops sold in supermarkets often contain water well in excess of industry standards, which means consumers are paying for water not meat. In contrast, because scallopers in Maine waters are required to stay within the state\u2019s jurisdiction and are only allowed to catch a limited quantity of scallops, they only go out for a few hours. That short time frame, coupled with the frigid temperatures, means they can put their scallops in dry buckets. No ice needed.<\/p>\n Yet, en route to processing centers, those fresh Maine scallops also get soaked and then lumped together with their offshore cousins. A person buying New England scallops at the supermarket may get a now-besmirched Maine scallop or two in the mix and never be the wiser. \u201cIt\u2019s like,\u201d Brawn pauses, searching for an analogy with appropriate gravitas, \u201ctaking a bottle of Dom P\u00e9rignon and pouring it into a vat of Barefoot bubbly.\u201d<\/p>\n Elevating a superior product like Maine scallops into haute cuisine requires both luck and pluck. A point of comparison is the story of Maine\u2019s famed shellfish, the lobster, once referred to as the cockroach of the sea and a meal even prisoners despised. But in the mid-1800s, when it became possible to deliver lobsters long distances via rail, far-flung consumers began to prize the crustacean\u2019s rich meat. Then, thanks to the rise of canning technology over the next several decades, lobster meat became accessible, abundant, and cheap. By the end of the Second World War, the lobster fishery had become one of the country\u2019s most valuable.<\/p>\n Maine scallops are slick and slightly sweet, and about the size of apricots. Togue Brawn of Downeast Dayboat sells the premium product for $30 to $35 a pound, and says some of her clients claim the scallops have changed their lives. Photo by Sujata Gupta<\/p><\/div>\n Creating the same sort of niche market for Maine scallops, and in turn bolstering the livelihoods of the fishermen catching them, became Brawn\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre. But her life mission came with a built-in existential crisis. How does an evangelist convince the masses to pay top dollar (Maine scallops cost twice as much as those at my local supermarket in Burlington, Vermont) for a food item they don\u2019t know exists? Brawn is undeterred. \u201cWhen I want to do something, I just fucking do it,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not used to failure.\u201d<\/p>\n Back on the boat, the Sun has finally risen and Kristan Porter, the captain, determines he\u2019s reached the 61-kilogram daily limit. It\u2019s only 10:15 a.m. He reels in the dredge a final time and turns the boat back toward our launch point in Cutler, Maine, population 507. Once the houses along the shoreline come into view, he kills the engine and joins the deckhands in shucking scallops.<\/p>\n As he works, Porter talks about how things were in the early 1990s. Back then, the Maine guys could stay out all day and haul in 450 kilograms of scallops in a single go. By the mid-2000s, they were pulling in a tenth of that. \u201cWe started towing places we hadn\u2019t towed before,\u201d Porter says. Then those areas also started to dry up.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only limits that were there were put in place to prevent conflicts with the lobster fishery,\u201d Brawn adds. In practice, that translated to one season for lobster and another for scallops to ensure the scallop drags didn\u2019t accidentally haul in lobster traps.<\/p>\n Yet Brawn didn\u2019t have to look too far offshore to see a model that had worked in reviving scallop populations. By the 1990s, free-for-all fishing had decimated populations of both scallops and groundfish in federal waters across the Northeast. So in 1994, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) temporarily closed fishing for scallops and groundfish, such as cod, haddock, and flounder, in parts of an area known as Georges Bank. That 4,800-square-kilometer expanse, located in the waters around Nantucket and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, accounted for roughly half of all scallop landings in New England. Then NOAA waited for over four years to partially reopen those waters.<\/p>\n While some of the groundfish, particularly cod, failed to rebound, in part because they kept swimming out of protected areas, the closures turned out to be perfectly suited for scallops, whose modus operandi involves dashing off a few meters to escape a predator and then hunkering back down into the substrate.<\/p>\n Captain Kristan Porter shucks a scallop as his boat returns to shore in Cutler, Maine, after reaching the 61-kilogram daily limit. Photo by Sujata Gupta<\/p><\/div>\n The multiyear closure also worked with the scallops\u2019 non-linear growth curve\u2014the mollusks double their weight and reach harvestable size between their third and fifth years. Yet in the \u201990s, it had become common to catch younger scallops that had not reached harvestable size. Moreover, because scallops are sold by weight, the older, heavier ones bring in considerably more money. So the theory was that letting scallops reach age five would significantly increase the harvest, says Dvora Hart, operations research analyst at the federal government\u2019s Northeast Fisheries Science Center at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n The results of the experiment were dramatic. Less than two years after the closures, scallop biomass in the closed areas had tripled, in part because the scallops were enormous. \u201cThey were fishing these little three-inch [7.6-centimeter] scallops back in the mid-\u201990s, and when they went into these closed areas, they were getting scallops that were five to six inches [12.7 to 15.2 centimeters],\u201d Hart says.<\/p>\n Today, rotational fishing remains in place in those waters off Massachusetts, and has been implemented farther south. Meanwhile, the fishery has benefitted from the enactment of other measures, such as quotas on the quantity scallopers can haul in and limits to the numbers of days they can fish. \u201c[The federal Atlantic scallop] fishery is so healthy right now that you probably couldn\u2019t kill it if you had to,\u201d says Dana Temple, owner of Crescent Bay Inc., a seafood company in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.<\/p>\n Inspired, Brawn began agitating for a similar fishing ban in Maine when she started at the DMR. But faced with losing a chunk of their livelihood, and being notoriously averse to change, most fishermen were incensed. Pretty quickly, things got ugly. Once, when Brawn and her best friend, Deirdre Gilbert, now the director of marine policy at DMR, were intercepting fishermen coming in after a day\u2019s haul to answer survey questions, they encountered a man on his phone. Someone, he seethed, speaking loud enough for the two women to overhear, \u201cshould just shoot the DMR employees.\u201d<\/p>\n For 19 years, Brawn has worked as a waitress at J\u2019s Oyster in Portland, Maine. She took shifts all through graduate school, commuting the two hours each way on weekends, and even stayed on when she started at the DMR. Visited by celebrity chefs such as Anthony Bourdain, J\u2019s is legendary for once requiring waitresses to wear blouses, maroon hot pants with black stockings, and high heels. Although the hot pants days are now over, J\u2019s has retained its grit. \u201cTogue likes the saltiness of the place,\u201d says Leslie Nee, another longtime employee.<\/p>\n The clientele at J\u2019s educated Brawn in the language of Maine scallopers. She knew the crowd at fishermen\u2019s meetings wasn\u2019t the sort that responded to niceties or equivocations. Brawn showed her empathy instead with fresh-baked cookies and brownies, which she brought to every meeting of the state\u2019s Scallop Advisory Council (SAC). \u201cI was,\u201d she says, \u201cseven parts robocop and three parts cheerleader.\u201d<\/p>\n Initially, Brawn and Dana Temple, the SAC chair at the time, began picking off the low-hanging fruit\u2014a shortened fishing season, lower catch limits, and requiring bigger holes in the dredges so smaller scallops could escape and reproduce. But the larger, more elusive goal was to move ahead with a fishing ban.<\/p>\n In 2008, the SAC brought a closure plan to the state\u2019s umbrella advisory council for authorization. But after the advisory council determined that the plan lacked industry support, the measure failed and the 2008\u201309 fishing season opened with no closures in place.<\/p>\n The matter came to a head in early 2009, when DMR commissioner George LaPointe warned the SAC that if the fishermen failed to generate an interim closure plan, the second half of the season would be canceled. To prepare for the February make-or-break meeting, Brawn made five batches of brownies and cookies. Eighty-five mostly angry fishermen showed up that afternoon and refused to eat the baked goods. Then Farrell Beal, a well-respected fisherman, finally took a bite and pronounced the brownies the best he\u2019d ever eaten.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n<\/a>
\n