Tough going for Suffolk bayman in winter

Nathan Andruski is wearing two T-shirts, three sweatshirts, pajama bottoms, jeans, one pair of regular socks, one pair of thermal socks, boots, a baseball cap, wool hat and a pair of lined gloves topped by rubber gloves.

He stares at the ice. It's thick around the dock where his boat is moored at the New Suffolk Shipyard. Several yards out, the ice cover separates into chunks, and further on, a thinned layer skims the surface of Peconic Bay. The early-morning air registers 20 degrees. He turns and heads back to his pickup truck to pull on a pair of orange chest waders.

It's about 7 a.m. and the start of another day of scallop season, which runs from the first Monday in November through the end of March. Aboard his 20-foot Privateer, Andruski, of Southold, grinds through the ice cover, a large coffee in hand. He takes along Gatorade, a container of fuel, a few tools and a cell phone, safe in a plastic box.

The ice makes the going tough, and the boat is burning through fuel. It takes 15 minutes to clear the ice, after which he dons a mask to protect against the wind. It's a four-mile trip to his favored destination in the bay.

A bayman is allowed to harvest 10 bushels a day, six days a week and never on Sunday. When the season began, Andruski's was one of about 50 boats jammed into the bay, and it took him just a few hours to reach his daily goal of four to five bushels. By late January, his boat is one of seven.

In water 10 feet deep, he tosses his 10 dredges - mesh baskets used to scoop scallops from the bay bottom - over the gunwales, then motors slowly in circles, dragging the dredges for 15 to 20 minutes. One at a time, he hauls them in, dumping the contents onto one of two culling boards.

Each dredge contains much more than the cash crop he's after. From the pile on the culling boards, he picks out each scallop and discards the dregs: random spaghetti grass, spider crabs, blue crabs, horseshoe crabs and occasional stray bottle. Size matters, and scallops that don't measure up to state regulations are tossed back into the bay.

Lap after lap, the dredge-and-sort routine continues until the catch begins to dwindle, and he moves on into deeper waters. About 61/2 hours after he began, his face windburned, he heads back to shore with the day's take: five bushels. Hauling one bag at a time, he heads up the slippery ramp to load his truck.

He drops them off at Braun Seafood in Cutchogue, where the scallops will be shucked and then weighed. Payment can fluctuate day to day, and for this delivery he'll wind up getting $13 per pound.

For Andruski, who is president of the Southold Town Baymen's Association, scalloping season is the most financially rewarding. The rest of the year he fishes for clams, bluefish, sea bass, porgies and blackfish. He's 30 years old and says he's been fishing since he was a boy, when he was taught by his uncle. He started working the bay as a teenager, managing to buy his first boat with money saved from a job at Miss Tillie's Seafood, a fish market in Southold where he would open scallops and arrange fish.

"I love working on the water. I get to do what I want, nothing or no one to hold me back," he says. "I work hard, I'm my own boss. I set my own hours doing exactly what I love." He insists he would never consider doing anything else.

But he hates the ice. Hates the winter. And admits he has limits: If the temperature drops below 20 degrees and the winds register 25 mph or higher, he stays on dry land.