Baymen get jump on scallop season

East End baymen have been out scouting the bay bottoms for scallops, and state environmental officials say they expect a good harvest when the season officially begins in state waters on Monday.

Although it is illegal to harvest scallops before dawn on the first Monday in November, there is nothing wrong with finding out where they may be hiding, as long as any scallops that are picked up are dumped back in the water.

“The people who go out looking for scallops are essentially testing their equipment,” said state Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman Bill Fonda. “I would imagine they go back to those spots once the season opens.”

In the past few years, despite active scallop seeding programs, good harvests usually lasted only a few weeks. The state scallop season begins Monday and runs to March 31, but each town can delay the opening of its own waters to stretch out the season for its baymen. In East Hampton, for example, town waters will not open for scalloping for another two weeks.

State figures for 2009, the most current year available, show 18,675 pounds of scallops harvested that year.

Decades ago, when the Great South Bay was still an active scallop breeding ground — before pollution and red tide algae and other problems led to a severe decline in the harvest — thousands of people worked Long Island’s bays. In the peak year of 1974, 678,417 pounds of scallops were harvested, and shucking scallops in garages and selling them on the side of the road gave a financial boost to hundreds of families on the East End.